For imaging(reinstalling/updating/blah blah!) more than fifty ppc iMacs and G5 Mac Towers in less than a day, I started using Deploy Studio instead of NetRestore.

However on booting a client from the NetBoot server, i got the following sign on ppc client machine

After reading some notes on NetBoot here, I found this reason:

The mach.macos.mkext file is a kernel extensions cache — a file containing all the important kernel extensions for basic network booting. Its fairly uncommon to run into problems in this stage of the Netboot process, however, there are a couple specific issues that can cause kernel panics at this point. Possible problems would be:

Not having a mach.macosx and mach.macosx.mkext file in your Netboot set

And when checked mach.macosx.mkext was actually missing from the nbi’s dmg file. So I generated one using following code

kextcache -a ppc -m /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/DeployStudioRuntime-091207-145110.nbi/ppc/mach.macosx.mkext -N -L /Volumes/DeployStudioRuntime/System/Library/Extensions/

And my netboot imaging operation was back in business. Ahhh…. Freshly minted macs by the time I walk in tomorrow morning.

I hardly get enough time away from my Mac machines, so I planned to get back in touch with the penguin, and to build a test server.

My plan was to install Xen, and then run a Linux instance on top of it. However the only spare machine was a G5 Xserve, I could not find any information of Xen on ppc processor.

Choosing Linux flavour for ppc wasn’t easy either. Most of the open source linux flavours have stopped supporting ppc, as it seems like a dying platform. Red Hat and Suse seem to support the architecture in their enterprise versions. I did’nt wanted to run YDL, the only flavour I could find truely supporting ppc architecture.

Finally, I decided to go ahead with the Ubuntu 8.04 Server community version for ppc.

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