In order to netboot Macintosh clients, your DHCP server must
support sending the Mac-specific netboot options to the
client. Apple provides such a DHCP server with OS X Server,
but it is also possible to support netbooting Macs using
ISC's standard DHCP
server. By employing
Netatalk as an
AppleShare server for Unix/Linux, it is even possible to
netboot Macs without OS X Server, or indeed without an Apple
server at all.
Here is a patch for enabling Mac netboot support in ISC's
DHCP 3.0, 3.0p1, and 3.0p2 (see below for link to patch against 3.0.1):
To use this patch, download the patch and the source code for
the DHCP server (
dhcp-3.0pl2.tar.gz).
After unpacking the source archive (usually something like
tar -xzvf dhcp-3.0pl2.tar.gz) enter the source
directory and apply the patch with
patch -p1 < /path/to/dhcp-3.0-macnb-0.4.patch
Then compile DHCP like you normally would (usually just
./configure,
make, and
make
install).
A patch for DHCP 2.0pl5 is available
here.
A patch for DHCP 3.0.1 is available
here.
If patching and compiling isn't for you, and you wish to run
a DHCP server on an RPM-based Linux distribution, these RPMs
may be of use:
The other associated binary RPMs (
dhclient and
dhcp-relay) are provided in their respective
directories for the sake of completeness, as are the RPMS for
older versions.