How does a NetBoot server advertise itself?

I'm running the NetBoot service on a box running Mac OS X 10.5.6 server. I've been changing images to serve up, and most of them work, but the last one I tried doesn't -- if you go to System Preferences -> Startup Disk on a client, it doesn't see a specific network startup option.

It occurs to me to ask how the server advertises its services. I know it uses the Boot Service Discover Protocol (BSDP) which (as I understand it) can also act as a DHCP server. It would seem then that running:

ipconfig getpacket en0

possibly as root, would show something related to NetBooting, but it doesn't appear to.

Likewise, I know that a NetBoot server does not have to be your DHCP server. Therefore one would think it uses mDNS to advertise itself. When I fire up Bonjour Browser, though, I don't identify anything that says to me, "Ah, there is my NetBoot service."

Solution 1:

Is the client on the same subnet as the server? I believe that you have to configure something additional on the switches if this is not the case, as BSDP is a broadcast.

Poke around here: http://www.bombich.com/

He is the god of Mac image deployment. He recently stopped developing his remote deployment software, because there was a lot of overlap with deploy studio, but the concepts in his documentation are still entirely relevant.

Edit: Relevant link on Bombich's site: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/nbas.html