The Installation tab on the recipe page should only claim that netboot configuration has been done when the configure_netboot is actually *completed*. (Same for the other commands as well). If it's still queued, it could actually fail (see for example bug 1362369).
Relatedly, if the commands for provisioning a recipe (whether configure_netboot or any of the other three) fail we should actually show that on the installation tab somehow -- currently there is no indication. I'll leave that for bug 1372800 though.
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/5197
Beaker 24.0 has been released.