Slow NetBoot

Hello,
I made a task sequence from this;

1. A netboot image from a brand new machine with macOS 10.12.5
2. A netrestore image from AutoDMG and macOS 10.12.5, renamed to System.dmg
3. Imported both
4. Created a Task Sequence
5. NetBooted, and started to wait ...
6. and continued to wait ...
7. and wait ...
8. After a long time (> 15 minutes), still "booting" i cancelled

Network is good, discovery works fine, boot time very longer - longer than I can stand ;-)
Tried the same thing with a VM, but the same result.
Test environment:
MacBookPro with 10.12.5
SCCM 2012 R2 with Parallels 5.0.3.9

Actually, I've got this to work a few weeks ago, but can't do it now.

Any ideas?

 

Hello Mikael,
Do you boot the same Mac from which you have created Boot Image?

 

Yes and No ;-)

I use the same and another Mac as well. None of them works.
From the log file. Can not see anything wrong.

 

OK, tested again.

1. Made an AutoDMG image from a macOS 10.12.5 installer (fetched from MAS)
2. Renamed the image to System.dmg (will use it as NetRestore image later on)
3. Used the image, and with SuperDuper! I restored the image to a MacBookAir (some years old but Sierra savvy)
4. Logged in on the MBA and used the PmmOsdImageBuilder to build a NetBoot set. No error, but also not any additional settings. Just exported to a folder
5. Created WIM:s from the both images. No errors
6. Distributed them. No errors
7. Created a Task Sequence with the NetRestore image and and a piece of software (a first boot script)
8. Deployed the TS
9. NetBooted a Mac (a MBA, a MBP, a VM with faked hw.model [yes, it is a VMW Fusion machine]). All boot up perfectly fine, but when reaching the end of the progress bar they just hang. No errors in log file.
10. No clues how to solve this
11. Did, what I can remember, exactly the same thing two weeks ago with no problems. Same SCCM, same Macs, different TS.

Can it be macOS 10.12.5 that causes the problem?

 

When you say "brand new" do you mean Mac recently bought or just erased and reinstalled? We saw that boot images from recently bought Macs are not always work properly. For now we don't know the exact reason of that.
If its so, please reinstall OS X using installer from the AppStore and create new Boot Image from it. Or use other Mac with OS X installed from AppStore installer.

 

Brand new as in "machine erased and installed with 10.12.5 and not touched". It is an 2013 MacBook Air and macOS 10.12.5 installed.
Should I step down to 10.12.3 or 10.12.4 instead? And make the NetBoot set from there?

 

Yes, please try use 10.12.3 or 10.12.4. We will investigate it in our lab.

 

Well, it seems to be some time-out situation.
I took my images and brought them to another SCCM system. Created netboot and netrestore wim files and then a task sequence. It worked like a charm. 20 seconds to find the NetBoot server, 3 minutes to boot, and a little more than 10 minutes to install and verify. So I am happy for now. I'll check the network, but as far as I can guess, there is no problems with the images and wims.

I'll stick to the 10.12.4 images, but will test to update in some weeks.

 

Mikael,
If you are familiar with the WireShark, then may you look at network traffic between you Mac and NetBoot server? Compare result with example in this knowledge base article http://kb.parallels.com/123287. Let us know the result.

 

Thanks Evgeny,
Will test WireShark.
We tested to PXE-boot some Windows machines and they installed as expected. Macs cant be installed though. I've called some SCCM experts to look deeper into to the issue.