North Star Labs

Digging around in a NetBoot-Install.dmg file created by NetRestore Helper, I found a nice little gem.

In Leopard, and perhaps earlier versions of Mac OS X, we’re able to start a VNC server with the machine serial number as a password. This is particularly interesting for a managed network or lab environment.

As an example, I’m starting a VNC server in my NetBoot-Install image with the following shell script:

# Credit to Mike Bombich for this snippet

VNC="/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/AppleVNCServer.bundle/Contents/MacOS/AppleVNCServer"

if [ -x "$VNC" ]; then
    "$VNC" -noRegister -serialNumber &
fi

I’m then able to quickly connect with Cmd+K in the finder:

If you’re scripting this, here’s a quick way to snag the serial number. I do this before I bless a client machine to netboot, so I have the serial number to connect back up once it’s in the NetRestore system.

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | \
  grep -i 'serial number' | \
  perl -ple 's/.*:\s+(\w+).*?/$1/'