NetBoot through the Internet

[rageguy]

Is there a way to netboot across the internet? They are on completely different subnet, gateway, everything.

The situation is that I have a leopard macbook at home, and an OSX 10.5 server at school running NetBoot. It works fine when I am at school because I'm on the same subnet, same network. But what about when I am at home?

 

[edesignuk]

Why would you even want to network boot over the internet?

Sloooooooooooooooooooooooooow...

 

[belvdr]

It is technically possible, but not feasible. You'd have to get your router configured to perform relay, and then you'd need to get the school to open up the ports on their end.

If they are using private IP's and the boot server is not NAT'ed, you can forget it.

 

[Consultant]

Unless you have an extremely fast corporate network speed connection, it's not possible nor useful. Just buy a thumbdrive or 2.5" external drive.

Perhaps you are thinking of portable user? That can be enabled in the server for the specific account.

 

[rageguy]

thanks so much for all the responses. i have found what i am looking for. bombich's netboot across subnets (NBAS) is a nice software that modifies the nvram, such that when you attempt to boot from the network, it'll look for a specific ip address for the netboot server, instead of scavenging the network for a bootp signal.

http://www.bombich.com/software/nbas.html

that is the software i have used. and it worked in my example. an osx server with netboot in the school. a macbook with NBAS at home. managed 15-20 MB (megabytes)/sec. boots to osx in 4-5 minutes and then launching apps did not take too long. overall it is "usable".

the reason why i am doing this? i want to be able to use deploystudio in my situation. i have a few mac computer labs which are not in the same network (they have different subnet and gateway). i want to be able to multicast an image to that lab through the network. makes deploying an image to all 20 imacs easier, instead of using CCC for each and every imac.

 

[Les Kern]

Why not grab a Mac Mini, put on OS X server and set up Netboot on that. so cheap you can put a headless one in each location or grab and run. Booting across subnets, depending on your topology (like if your P2P is 100MB and not 1GB), COULD be detrimental to other users.