NetBoot/NetInstall settings in Server Admin buggy as ****?

Question

Hi,
I administer a Mac pool in College. We recently updated to all new iMacs (except for one, which still is a 2006 C2D iMac) and Leopard Server running on a PowerMac G4 (Dual 1GHz, 1.5 GB RAM).
Except for a few initial quirks with Directory Services, Leopard Server runs fine and snappy on the G4 and seems highly reliable. But then again, there's this BIG problem with NetInstall.
We setup one of the new iMacs as the master computer with all the neccesary software installed, and then created a NetInstall image from it using System Image Utility. It took a while, but went fine.
We then placed the image in the proper directory (Library/NetBootSP0), and configrured and launched NFS and NetBoot services in Server Admin. It found the image and offered configuration for it. But somehow, the most essential settings are not saved, when clicking "Save" in server admin, no matter whether the service is still running or being stopped before settings are changed.
These settings are saved by Server Admin:
Default image
Enable this image
Diskless (while not being available)
Architecture (Universal, Intel or PPC)
Protocol (NFS or HTTP)
While these settings *are not* saved by Server Admin whatsoever:
Model property filtering ("Allow any Apple Computer" vs. "Allow only specified models")
MAC Address filtering ("Allow only listed clients and deny others" vs. "Deny listed clients and allow all others")
(These settings appear when selecting an image from the list an clicking on the Edit-button (with a pen on it))
Whenever I make a change to this and click "Save", Server Admin simply ignores this and reverts it to the default settings, which are "Allow any Apple Computer" an "Allow only listed clients and deny others" with no clients listed.
When I leave the setting on "allow listed and deny others" (Whitelist), an add a clients MAC Address and save, this is ignored by Server Admin.
When I change the setting to "deny listed and allow others" (Blacklist), and save, this is ignored by Server Admin too. No matter whether I add MAC Addresses to the blacklist or not.
That way, the NetBoot service will *not send my NetInstall Image to any client*, because it thinks it has a whitelist configured, that is permanently empty. Clients not added to the whitelist are denied, which is good, but it is not possible at all, to even add a client to that whitelist. Blacklisting some machine and allowing all others doesn't work either.
Editing the approproate NBImageInfo.plist manually showed me, that Server Admin is able to:
read settings for specified types of models properly, but unable to change this setting
and *unable to even read settings about whitelisted or blacklisted MAC addresses* from the plist (keys "EnabledMACAddresses" or "DisabledMACAddresses") properly.
And so, it also cannot write these settings into the plist, it seems.
I have to NetInstall the classroom until thursady, and because of this bug, I cannot get it to work as it should, since all my cients are denied the image. This is very frustrating.
What can I do?
Message was edited by: jamespsullivan

Answer 1

MAC address filtering at the server level works, just not filtering at the image level. Depending on exactly what you are trying to achieve, this might help. But, I'm not clear on exactly what you are trying to achieve with the filtering.
The 1,0 syntax is mostly irrelevant. It is simply a reference to the NIC on the connecting system. If you have a machine with multiple NIC's (such as a Mac Pro) you might see something like 2,0:xx... instead. Regarding the rest of it, I believe the Server admin will accept accept any MAC address in the format of xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with or without leading 0's (i.e. 00:0a:1b vs. 0:a:1b).
Model filtering information is stored in the NBImageInfo.plist, and can be manually tweaked with an appropriate application of force. You can manually move system types that you want enabled into the EnabledSystemIdentifiers list (and, of course, remove them from the DisabledSystemIdentifiers list).