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NetBoot Service Disabled
If you run a NetBoot server, you may have seen the NetBoot service become disabled and the bubble that is normally green, red, or gray, instead has a silver color. When this happens, the NetBoot service won't allow you to stop, start, or change the service. In most cases, the NetBoot service is actually still running - you just can't use Server Admin to administer it.
Apple has a kbase article (305493) that explains one solution:
- Quit Server Admin
- sudo /bin/rm -rf /var/servermgrd
- sudo launchctl stop com.apple.servermgrd
- Launch Server Admin
An alternate method as posted on the macos-x-server Mailing List is to do the following:
- sudo killall mountd
- sudo rm /var/db/mountdtab
- sudo mountd
NOTE:For some reason, after performing this procedure, Netboot only tries doing NFS mounts on port 711 (if my memory serves) rather than the standard 2049. This ultimately causes netboots to fail, which only a server reboot seems to fix, so that may be the best solution to the whole problem anyway.
As a last resort, rebooting the server appears to remedy the problem.
Here's an explaination about the cause, from Michael Bartosh:
It seems to be related (when I've seen it) to an rpc failure. Specifically, the showmount command is failing, which hangs the whole servermgrd plug-in. You can catch showmount every once in awhile in the process listing, and showmount fails on the server when you try to execute it.
And a followup message, from David Rocamore:
Like you, I am convinced that this is a problem with the admin tool, not
netboot itself. The showmount command works fine for me on my machines but
what I find telling is running serveradmin from the command line.
When I run "sudo serveradmin status netboot" on a server with a greyed out
netboot indicator I get:
netboot:state = "RUNNING"
So that's good, at least I know netboot is working. When I go for more
information and run "sudo serveradmin fullstatus netboot" I get this result:
2006-05-23 09:03:12.248 serveradmin[29225] Exception in doCommand: ***
-[NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: attempt to insert nil keynetboot:error
= "NIL_RESPONSE_ERR (*** -[NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: attempt to
insert nil key)"
My knowledge of Cocoa is limited, but I feel like this indicates a problem
with the admin tools.