Cisco PacketTracer#

I needed to install Cisco PacketTracer app.

It is required for this course:

There are three problems:

  1. I don't use Ubuntu to install the only provided package for Linux
  2. No way I will run software like this directly on my system
  3. Installing in VM will eat my RAM and disk space

So I made a tiny script to build and run this blob inside a Linux container.

It is in this repo: bitsnips

The image is still little bloated - but that is the norm these days...

If you check my Dockerfile then you will notice that I really did maximum to keep the image small (squashing the layers might help a little).

REPOSITORY                    TAG         IMAGE ID      CREATED       SIZE
localhost/cisco_packettracer  latest      9a51015287b7  24 hours ago  1.32 GB

First Run#

Please check the repo for the README and guidance - I will not cover it here extensively.

Download the deb package#

The application is free to download here (if the link changes try to search for it...):

Build the image#

Adjust the CISCO_FILE or save it as:

download/CiscoPacketTracer_900_Ubuntu_64bit.deb

Run the build:

./cisco_packettracer.sh build

Run the container#

./cisco_packettracer.sh run

If the build was successful and you are using Xorg then it should work fine.

On the startup couple of windows will show up.

I was not sure what is the question here and I just clicked no:

Setting Up#

The script will mount local directory on your system so the Cisco app can store login credentials - otherwise you would have to re-login on every run...

I recommend to enable the "Keep me logged in":

For some reason spawning browser from within the container stopped working but you can click on "Advanced Settings" and enable internal web browser:

Then you login:

And Voilà:

It works!