Q:  I'm booting a NetBoot clientÐor, rather, trying to.  But it keeps looping through the reboot, getting only as far as allocating a swapfile.  What's wrong?

A:  One cause of this could be that the client's private partition is not exported correctly.   The private partition must be exported with root access for the client.  Even when /etc/exports indicates a proper entry, if a parent directory of the client's private partition is a) on the same filesystem, and b) exported without root access for the client, then the client's private partition is not exported with root access for the client (note that exports information is stored in the NetInfo database in Release 3 and later; see the NetInfo exports directory and NFSManager.app).

A situation where this readily occurs is when you're trying to use a machine with one partition on the disk as the NetBoot server.  This is not a supported configuration.  In this situation, the exports file might look like:

/	-access=rhino:cockatoo
/clients/rhino	-access=rhino,root=rhino
/clients/cockatoo	-access=cockatoo,root=cockatoo

If the disk has only one partition then the clients' partitions is not exported with root access for the client.  To fix this, change the exports file to:

/	-access=rhino:cockatoo,root=rhino:cockatoo

If you want to leave the explicit lines for the two client partitions, that causes no harm, and might help avoid a problem if you ever set things up on a two-partition disk.

Valid for 1.0, 2.0, 3.0