Can you NetBoot/NetInstall into El Capitan from Snow Leopard Server?

Short answer: Yes.

You may have an Snow Leopard Server and you run your business on it. Your client Macs may also connect to it for File Sharing, VPN, or other services that are available on this full featured server operating system.

You also want to make sure that your client Macs use up to date operating systems and you’ve made the decision to upgrade them all to El Capitan.

If you have only a few Macs then it makes sense to just use the App Store to upgrade. If you have more than a few you could create a USB key with the El Capitan installer on it and visit each Mac and upgrade them - may you want to make copied of the installer key to give to your support team so the upgrade can be done in less time.

What if you have a lot of Macs to upgrade? You could use the NetBoot/NetInstall service to make this job much easier for. Great, but you have a 10.6 Server operating system, you have no idea whether you can achieve this using a 7 year old server and you don’t want to test using your production server. Just in case things go wrong due to configuration changes you will make.

Thankfully, we at LeftBrain have tested this and we can confidently say that it works! If you want to test this yourself then read the rest of this blog post.

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