Free your NetBoot Server with BSDPy

Speaker: Pepijn Bruienne

Many Mac Admins still rely on NetBoot as their means of booting their imaging client of choice, whether it’s DeployStudio, Casper Imaging or another home brew solution. Fact is that until now you needed to hang on to that one OS X Server in your server room to run the NetBoot or NetInstall service, limiting your options in a modern data center where it likely got relegated to the “Special Mac Section”.

No more! With BSDPy, a modern implementation of Apple’s venerable BSDP protocol that underlies NetBoot and NetInstall, you can finally put that OS X Server to rest and run your NetBoot services using modern Linux-based solutions. In this talk we will look at the difficulties involved in developing BSDPy and matching all of Apple’s NetBoot functionality, best practices when deploying large scale NetBoot services and how to best deploy, manage and monitor them with BSDPy using its preferred deployment platform, Docker.