A lot of the environments I tend to come across still run workstations on older versions of macOS due to software compatibility concerns. These environments rarely deal with devices that include Apple’s T2 Security Chipset or APFS filesystem, and DeployStudio imaging tends to be the fastest and most efficient way to quickly turn over workstations to new freelance teams.
In larger environments, or environments with Avid’s older ISIS Storage Systems, client workstations are usually spread across multiple subnets. This can cause issues for a DeployStudio workflow if these client workstations are in different subnets from the DeployStudio Server.
Thankfully, as long as there is routing between subnets, you can usually uses the macOS bless command to tell your workstation to boot off of a remote netboot server.
For Mac workstations running a macOS below El Capitan (10.11), you can use the following command in the terminal:
sudo bless --netboot --nextonly --server bsdp://IP_ADDRESS sudo shutdown -r now
For machines running macOS El Capitan (10.11) or later, you will first need to boot into recovery mode to “trust” the netboot/DeployStudio server before your workstation will see it. Once you are in recovery mode, you can use the commands below to “trust” the netboot server and boot into the DeployStudio console:
csrutil netboot add IP_ADDRESS sudo bless --netboot --nextonly --server bsdp://IP_ADDRESS sudo shutdown -r now