Mac Mini Server Tips: Lion Restore without WiFi or DHCP

[admin]

Mac Mini Server Tips: Lion Restore without WiFi or DHCP
Friday, January 20, 2012
Posted by: Jon Schwenn

The lack of physical installation media for Lion was met with mixed reviews. The replacements for the physical media were the App Store, Lion Recovery partition, and Internet Recovery. The Lion Recovery partition allows you to access the terminal, Disk Utility, and reinstall Lion. It's also much faster than loading the tools from a DVD.

If you're running a Lion server in a wired network environment without DHCP and you want to reinstall Lion, you're not stuck with a slower WiFi connection. You can use terminal to assign a static IP address prior to attempting the reinstallation. Although the Lion Recovery partition has most of the files needed, Internet access is required to validate the machine and download additional data.

For example, to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Lion, you'd first boot to the Lion Recovery partition. Using the Disk Utility you can erase the hard drive. Close Disk Utility and open Terminal from the tools menu. Enter the two following commands into the terminal:

networksetup -setmanual Ethernet xxx.xxxx.xxx.xxx 255.255.255.x xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

(replace 'x' with your: IP address, subnet mask, gateway)

networksetup -setdnsservers Ethernet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

(replace 'x' with your DNS server)

Quit Terminal and continue on with reinstalling Lion.

This Mac mini Server tip was provided by Jon Schwenn from Mac Mini Vault. Jon has been managing Linux and Mac web servers for over a decade. His certifications include ACTC and RHCE.



http://www.123macmini.com/news/story/1773.html

[macmanmacman]

Pretty cool my alternative for this is to build a lion magic DVD using a lightscribe drive and cdcovers.cc best site for custom covers for Macintosh software including DVD covers for Mac software all there computer covers are located under pc though so if your looking for a Mac section just search under pc

[jonschwenn]

[Grasshopper]

I understand the benefits if wireless isn't available, but I wonder what the time savings of wired vs wireless is on a decent connection with 802.11n?
_________________
2011 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM
2012 Mac mini Server with 16GB of RAM
46" Sony TV
24" HP LCD
Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse
2 x 1TB MiniStacks

[jonschwenn]