I am getting an awful lot of these in system.log and console.log: Turning the DNS service on for this server is not an option. I have reinstalled the 10.4.3 server combo update, repaired permissions, created new boot images, and toggled other netboot or netinstall images with no success. NetBoot continues to work for me, I can boot clients until the cows come home, but I cannot make any configuration changes or see who's booted. I can usually boot one or two clients before getting the cursed grey dot, but once it appears, I can no longer do any of the above mentioned tasks from Server Admin.app. I can access logs, review the client list and settings, make configuration settings, and start and stop the service. The service will appear normal shortly after restarting the entire server.
Since the upgrade to Tiger on the server, I am also seeing the darker grey status bubble next to the NetBoot service in Server Admin.app. There are about 1,000 or so Macs on our network and I have a 10.4.2 NetBoot server that is used for remote imaging (with ARD) and diagnostics/repairs. We have about 10,000 machines on our network and VitalQIP for DNS management. I am having very similar problems in a medium-sized enterprise environment. Has anyone else seen this and done any further troubleshooting on it? I tried it just now to break it again to try to get more information for this post, but it is actually working again at the current site (although not at two others). But within a day it may be able to start working fine again and deploy images to clients. Once the system breaks it seems to exhibit the pattern above for a while, even after restarting the server.
(The curious will notice that just about all these troubleshooting steps were described either on Bombich's site or on pages 454-455 of Bartosh and Faas's "Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration) The only way to restore NetBoot functionality from here is to restart the server. Killing mountd and bringing it back up in debug mode (mountd -d) does not indicate any strange behavior, and does restore the mounts to "showmount" but does not actually fix NetBoot, which by this point seems hopelessly lost. One of the log files available through the XServe's Console.app showed that mountd was aware of the requests from the clients but was not able to fulfill them. no /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0 shows up with showmount).
A "showmount -e" to the server's IP, however, showed that no mounts at all were being offered by NFS (i.e. Running "rpcinfo -p" on the server showed everything looking fine. It became clear immediately that there were RPC communication problems using both TCP and UDP. I did a bit more troubleshooting and started the NetBoot client in verbose mode. The faulty behavior did not appear prior to OS X Server 10.3.9 and I had previously been able to perform 50-client NetBoots in one of the same network environments (I am seeing the problem at three sites). NFS services show up in the Server Admin screens as all running fine. Server Admin shows the NetBoot process as "busy" (light green with elipses) and all the Server Admin detail screens are blank. Subsequent clients are unable to finish boot-they can find the server and request the image but stop there at the graphical stage that Mike Bombich would describe as "spinning globe turns into indeterminate progress indicator" ( The server starts as normal, the Netboot service shows up fine, and the first OS X client can start NetBooting. I am seeing the same problems with OS X Server 10.3.9 and 10.4.2. I am going to cross-post this to the mailing list. But as soon as one client connects, the netboot service hangs and I get the same error messages I received before. Once the server reboots the service comes back up and I can Netboot again.
The only thing I can do to restart the netboot service is reboot the server. Also, if I click on the Netboot service in the Server Admin console, the settings option is gone, if I click on clients nothing appears at all, if I click on logs it says "no data available". It is a darker gret however than services that are disabled. However on the Netboot server, the service indicator turns from green to grey. When I Netboot the client it see's the Netboot server and actually netboots the client. Configured the Netboot service and imported the image properly to the new Tiger server. I have installed Tiger Server on another MAC fresh. We are usin boot images from another server and they work fine for Netboot. I am using Netboot 2.0 with Tiger Server 10.4.2.