[ipxe-devel] iPXE for Apple hardware

[James A. Peltier]

----- Original Message -----
| On Friday 25 Mar 2011 06:58:12 James A. Peltier wrote:
| > Is there a similar chainload method that can be utilized outside of
| > EFI?
| > I'll look into the SDK to see how I can mould it into what I want.
| 
| Could you describe what you want to do with iPXE in a bit more detail?
| Assume
| that I know absolutely nothing about Deploy Studio.
| 
| Michael

Currently we use Deploy Studio on USB or CD/DVD to boot Apple Macintosh machines to install or capture disk images (mainly install) for computer labs.  I have a iPXE based installation server that can currently deploy all operating systems we support with the exception of Apple OS X.

I would like to be able to take these machines and iSCSI boot the DeployStudio image because it will be much faster than AFS, NFS, HTTP or basically any other method.  It is also far more consistent because we can ensure that all Macs are booting the most current version of the DeployStudio package that we build.  This has one other advantage, we don't have to have Mac servers specific to this task, just to the building of the images.

We also have other plans for iSCSI feature sets for Apple hardware and since I am familiar with iPXE it's kind of a good fit if we can make it work.

-- 
James A. Peltier
IT Services - Research Computing Group
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
Phone   : 778-782-6573
Fax     : 778-782-3045
E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
Website : http://www.sfu.ca/itservices
          http://blogs.sfu.ca/people/jpeltier