No preboot keyboard shortcuts working on White iMac 17" and 21"

We've had both 17" and 21" white iMacs for about 5 years and in that time I've re-imaged them at least 5 times (once a year) using NetBoot (hold down "N" on preboot). But recently I've noticed that these iMacs no longer register any pre-boot shortcuts including reset PRAM ("alt" + "cmd" + "p" + "r"). This means if I have a problem with them (i.e. if the hard disk fails) I won't be able to work any magic on them. Luckily I've not had any trouble yet but in time it'll need sorting out.

I originally assumed it was the last image i'd put on them, or the way in which I'd done it but noticed, but I didn't think that would effect anything pre-boot, like firmware.

I've done a few searches and found mostly mentions of Bluetooth/Wireless keyboards having this issue and one mention of 3rd party keyboards, but no real success finding anyone with this particular problem. I did a few more searches and found this which does sound more promising. The only difference being it does holding down "c" and "alt", but I didn't try these as I just assumed they would work after trying PRAM reset and "cmd" + "s" single user mode. (Never assume anything!)

A person down the bottom says the PRAM battery might have failed, which would make sense as they are over 5 years old and are unplugged for large periods of time (for security measures). The next question: How to replace battery in old white iMacs?

For the time being I shall just have to rely on them working and use the system prefs to alter startup disk.

Imaging OS X 10.6.6 on OS X server 10.4.11

I have over 100 Macs which need reimaging this summer. To make it nice and simple they will all have 10.6.6 installed. Unfortunately I only have a 10.4.11 server (PPC) which I don't think will be upgraded before summer ends! At the moment I have 9 brand new 27" iMacs which don't like the current version of Deploy Studio RC20.

The reason I only have RC20 installed it that this was the last version to support OS X 10.4.11. Now, I also have 9 24" new'ish iMacs which do work with Deploy Studio RC20, and some relatively new Mac Pro's which definitely work with Deploy Studio RC20. So it is still worth perhaps using it for the 90 or so Macs and resort to other techniques to reimage the 9 which don't work. Of course over time I will need a new system but to have a really good new system we'll need time.

So the plan is to carry on using deploy studio for 90% of the Macs, and resort to something else for the last 10%. Alternatives are:

• Carbon Copy Cloner
• SuperDuper
• The install disk
• the install disk on a removable hard drive
• A bootable 10.6.6 on a removable hard drive

Well, I've looked up CCC and can't find any reference to it having some bootable interface. It simply copies a hard drive to another, which to be fair could be bootable, so I might do this.

I'm currently trying the easiest of these which is to use the install disk. I've managed to find the command line for mounting an AFP share. So I've open terminal from the booted up install disk and typed:

mkdir /Volumes/tmp
mount -t afp afp://username:password@server.somewhere.ac.uk/Images/ /Volumes/tmp/

The image that was taken from the 10.6.6 27" iMac was either done in DeployStudio helper or Disk Utility. When trying to restore this image to a drive in Disk Utility it has come up with an error message:

Restore Failure Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned/scanned for restore

I did a quick search and came up with this. I do now remember that to restore off a network share using disk utility it does need to be scanned for restore. Put the image in Disk Utility and go to: Image > Scan for Restore. This takes a long time on the old Apple Server G4, but not so long on the new 27" iMacs!

It should be ready for restore now...

Restored 70GB compressed in 1 hour 45 over the old network, which isn't too bad. I don't think it'll be able to do multiple machines very efficiently though.

The next process is to try and create or use an old netboot image to netboot the slightly older machines. So it only gets easier from this moment onwards.

Setting up the new 27" iMacs

Setup started with the simple "hold down the n button" to netboot/netinstall. The first problem was that the current netinstall image would not work on the new iMacs, doh! So I set about making a new one. The old deploy studio RC20 seems to crash whilst making an image, so I needed to use a newer one. This newer one imaged without crashing, but when netbooting came up with a message saying the server needed updating to cope with the new netboot image.

The next thing I tried was to put an iMac in target disk mode and just reimage it using a 24" imac with I know works. I put the Mac Pro 10.6.6 image on it but would not boot up. This was probably due to new drivers not being on the image!

My last attempt is to start from scratch (or nearly from scratch) and install everything. I updated the operating system to the latest 10.6.8. I took a shortcut though and used "Migration Assistant" to pull across applications from the 10.6.6 image. This worked and only required me to install the newest of things. Heres a list of things which is now on the new iMac:

• Adobe CS5
• Final Cut Studio
• Firefox 4
• Acrobat 9 Pro
• Papercut client
• Celtx
• Office 2008 (required rosetta)
• Handbrake

And drivers

• Scanwizard
• Dell 3110 driver
• Pixma Driver
• Konica Driver
• HP Scanner 4370
• Wacom tablet
• Flip4Mac

After all this I tried a students account. It required 2 login attempts to get me in though. I then tried all the apps. The problems I encountered were:

• Photoshop crash on launch
• Illustrator crash on launch
• Indesign crash on launch
• Acrobat crash on launch

These were probably due to NHR (network home relocation) script not installed. I installed it and Photoshop and Acrobat started working. Unfortunately Illustrator nor InDesign would work! They worked perfectly fine on a local login. I ran the CS5 install again, and also updated Illustrator to 15.0.2 and InDesign to 7.0.4. Illustrator would crash on load up, and indesign would crash on the "new document" screen which comes up first. My only clue was a message which popped up in console which I can't quite remember now. Something to do with transport2app error 255.

Just relogged in and tried it again. The error's I'm getting from the console are:

07/07/2011 14:01:43 kernel smbfs_vnop_link: warning: pid 665(Adobe Illustrato) hardlink(~v3vZO_cBdNvr4jqB)

07/07/2011 14:01:49 mdworker32[673] kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.

07/07/2011 14:01:51 mdworker[658] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.

The first refers to the smbfs (samba file system) which must be the home drive of the student which is hosted on a windows share.

The only real difference is that the operating system in 10.6.8 instead of 10.6.6. I think I will have to redo this on a 10.6.6 machine....

So, redone a 10.6.6 version and migrated everything from 10.6.8 iMac. Everything worked! (apart from Adobe Acrobat and Dreamweaver. Acrobat crashes and dreamweaver gets stuck even loading up. I installed NHR and still the same. Interestingly Illustrator worked without NHR!

Looking into the issue a little more, I found that NHR is not entirely working. I've noticed that the caches folder is not being relocated, although the fonts folder is? I will have to look into this further. At the time I thought this was due to the test account having the links set up already from another machine, but thinking about it now these links should be deleted on logout! So now I'm thinking about it, it was originally working and now somehow it is not working any longer.

Netboot services "greyed out"

Services and/or Sharing greyed out:

The Netboot or other service list items in Server Admin Computers & Services column may be dimmed ("grayed out"). Dimmed items cannot be administered in Server Admin.

Solution

   1. On the affected server, quit Server Admin.

   2. Delete the /var/servermgrd/ directory.

   3. In Terminal, execute this command:

      sudo launchctl stop com.apple.servermgrd

   4. Restart Server Admin.

Also, if Netboot still isn't working:

sudo killall mountd

sudo rm /var/db/mountdtab

sudo mountd

Deploy Studio set up and DHCP problems

I've been using Deploy Studio server for at least 1 year, perhaps 2, and it's fantastic. It's streamlined imaging perfectly, with workflows helping with different setups.

But all good things have their drawbacks, and upon upgrading Deploy Studio server from RC14 to RC20 everything appeared good, until two days later the Network Administrator rings me up and asks if he can unplug the Xserver, doh! It appeared to be the cause of much dismay for those two days, constantly giving all computers wrong DHCP information, for which is was not even meant to be giving!

We looked into it and the Xserver was responding to DHCP requests and giving "no-dns-server.example.com" as the dns server, overriding what the computers normally had set, which caused much much confusion. It was of course quite amazing that the network administrator managed to track it down to this problem, but I do suppose it took two days.

Upon closer examination, we noticed the DHCP service was "apparently" not running, but when we switched the "Netboot' service off it no longer responded to DHCP requests. So it was the Netboot service which was using part of the DHCP service, which Alan was sure was not 'usual'. Of course we were not sure what it did before the trouble started, whether or not it responded before of not, and whether it was just the fact it was dishing out the wrong DHCP information (IP Stack someone later told me) rather then no information.

We looked at the stopped DHCP service settings and saw one entry, which did have "no-dns-server.example.com" in it's properties. We deleted this entry, which was the only entry, but we still received responses. We measured these responses and it was now giving out the right information, which was better, but we would have preferred it not to give any information.

So to conclude, I whittled it down to the update from Deploy Studio RC14 to RC20, where Deploy Studio had changed, and perhaps added the "no-dns-server.example.com" entry the way Netboot used the  DHCP service.