As far as I can google, it’s not been documented anywhere public. Until I got it working, I didn’t even know if it was possible.
Namely, Mac Netboot support alongside PC PXEboot support. Secondly, I have a mix of systems, and I don’t believe my use case is baked into Digital Rebar. I could spend a few days installing and configuring Digital Rebar and learning the way it solves the problem while relearning all that forgotten PXEBoot knowledge from 10 years ago, or I could choose to do one thing at a time and truly understand the simplest use case. So instead of just dropping in a very impressive toolset that does 500 things more than I need, I wanted to get familiar with the handful of things I do need in a focused way. I know that learning comes best from experiencing the pain firsthand. So why am I not going to use Digital Rebar?
It’s the latest from the folks that developed Crowbar.
I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading about this, and Digital Rebar looks like the best of breed for the power and customization aspects. Naturally, this can get out of hand without proper tooling once you go past, say, 10 servers. When that system is no longer being used in that production state, it goes through a similar re-provisioning process to become useful again for another application. It gets a base operating system followed by some configuration management to put it into a production state. The goal is that the provisioning system picks up from the power-on event from that point on. A technician can just unbox them, inventory the asset, slide them into the rack, cable it up, and be done with their part. Depending on the level of service, they may have the manufacturer/vendor prepare the systems a certain way before they show up at the door.
To make this easier and to reduce complexity at this layer, most organizations purchase one or more sets of similar servers from a single manufacturer. When building a “Metal as a Service” (MAAS) layer, the idea is to make it very easy to go from “box to rack to ready” for a large number of servers.
(cumu)lonimbus - At the intersection of full-stack cloud technologies, devops, security, and infrastructure as code Home Subscribe MaaS Part 1 - Netboot Macs and PXEBooting PCs from Linux