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You know how when you go to System Preferences->Startup Disk, and select Network, you see a list of network boot servers available to house from? Well, how can I get the same list along with the actual server address and TFTP filename, so I can use tftp to download it?

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By asking the question you're showing that you're in over your head already.

  1. Why would you want to do such a thing?
  2. This probably isn't what you really want.

If you were going to do this you would send a bootp request to the network. The DHCP server will then respond with your IP address and include a next-server address, which will be the address of the TFTP server. You would then request a file from the TFTP server based on your ether address. This file is only a kernel image, and not really usable alone. The kernel will have hard coded into it a network address (probably NFS) which will be location of the root filesystem.

It's not a bootable disk image that you can just put on a flash drive or optical disk.

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At the Apple Store, they will often netboot your machine to run a special diagnostic program kept internal to Apple. I want to download this to my computer, partially because I collect things like that. Also, how would I send the bootp request? Is there any kind of Terminal command to do that? – flarn2006 Aug 9 '11 at 8:36
It's an NFS share. You can't convert that to a bootable ISO. To generate the bootp request they way you would need you'll need to craft the packet raw. I get what you want to do, but the technical skill necessary is probably a bit beyond your level. Not to mention it's technically stealing since that software is private to Apple. – bahamat Aug 9 '11 at 19:31
It wouldn't be stealing since when they connect my own computer to their network, they are giving me access to it, and they'll still have it if I download it. But what I mean is how can I access that NFS share from Mac OS X and download the files off of it? – flarn2006 Aug 14 '11 at 3:59
In strictly legal terms you're violating the license agreement and making an unauthorized copy. – bahamat Aug 14 '11 at 17:39
But I wouldn't be making money off of it. I wouldn't even give it away for free if they tell me not to. – flarn2006 Aug 16 '11 at 23:45
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