Preparing the PT installation

I cannot provide an already configured Packet Tracer installation for intellectual property reasons. However, you can get PT here and follow the following instructions to configure it.

Create a base PT installation

To install PT on a Linux machine, you could do it manually or use the Ansible script in this project.

However, the easiest procedure is to create a VM which contains a PT installation (from now on the installation VM) using the following command:

MACHINES='./vagrant/configuration.rb' vagrant up

Before executing this command make sure that:

• vars.secret.yml exists and has a VNC password set by you.
• installation_file inside the group_vars/pt_backend file points to a tar.gz file with the base PacketTracer installation. For example, the one you have downloaded from the official site.
• Warning: Make sure that there is a folder called installation containing the PT files in the root of the compressed tar.gz file.
• The folder /tmp/backup exists. You could also change the folder to be synced in vagrant/only_packetTracer.rb.

Install PT

If you are not reusing a previous Packet Tracer installation folder (i.e., you are installing it for the first time), execute the following command and follow the instructions.

/opt/pt $ bin/PacketTracer6

Configure PT

Access the machine where PT is installed and run PT for the first time. If you have created the installation VM as suggested, simply start a VNC session on vnc://192.168.35.2:5900.

Once you have started PT, configure the following options:

• Configure IPC
  • Go to Extensions > IPC > Options...
  • Listen Port Number: 39000. (you can now skip this step as the port number is specified later using the --ipc-port parameter)
  • Allow Remote Applications: checked.
  • Always Listen On Start: checked.
• Configure Authentication (you can skip this step as all the information is already defined by default in the configuration file)
  • Go to Preferences > Publishers > Add... to add a trusted publisher so your ExApp is opened automatically.
  • Go to Extensions > IPC > Configure Apps...
  • Select PT Forge and in the Settings label, mark it to start "On Demand".
  • Wait... what PT Forge application are you talking about? Click here for more information.
• Save the options
  • Go to Options > Preferences > Administrative (tab) > Write Options To PT Installed Folder
  • Press the "Write" button.

Back up the configuration files

If you are creating the base installation using the installation VM as suggested, run the following command. It will create a folder with the desired file in the /tmp/backup directory.

MACHINES='./vagrant/configuration.rb' BACKUP=true vagrant provision

Otherwise, manually create this file following steps:

1. Create a backup folder (called BACKUP_PATH in the next steps).
2. Copy the PT installation directory: cp -r {INSTALLATION_PATH}/* {BACKUP_PATH}/installation
3. Copy the user configuration directory: cp -r {HOME}/pt {BACKUP_PATH}/config

• Note that pt corresponds with the name of the base folder of the PT installation (typically /opt/pt).

1. Copy the installation directory: cp -r {HOME}/.packettracer {BACKUP_PATH}/packettracer.conf

• Note that this is a hidden file in the home directory of the user who run PT.

1. Compress the backup folder: cd {BACKUP_PATH}; tar -zcvf installation.tar.gz ./*

Note: You could also only copy PT's installation and run it for the first time in each newly provisioned VM or container. However, this will require your intervention for each machine (you will need to close an emerging dialog which appears the first time you run PT). To ensure that PT starts automatically without human intervention (i.e., that no dialogs are shown in PT), we need to be sure to also copy the last two listed files.

Tell Ansible where these files are

For this, you need to customize group_vars/pt_backend and make sure that installation_file points to installation.tar.gz.