How to Access the Cisco Networking Academy with your Mac

I recently enrolled in the Cisco Networking Academy at the local community college and all of the curriculum taught in the classroom is available in a completely transparent manner on the Cisco Networking Academy website. If you’re a Mac user however, you’re going to run into browser compatibility issues. It appears that none of the mainstream browsers on the Mac such as Safari and Firefox are able to play nice with the academy’s JSP-based site. After trying to log into the academy, the browser dies at the redirect, http://cisco.netacad.net/cnams/public/Checker.jsp.

Having been observant while logging into the academy site on a Windows machine with Internet Explorer, Checker.jsp checks to see if you’re using either a MS or Netscape-based browser and once it meets those requirements, it than redirects to http://cisco.netacad.net/cnams/public/Login.jsp.

So if Mac users select the latter link, this will effectively bypass the browser check and will let you log into the site.

Since I’m not even halfway through the first of four classes in the CCNA certification sequence, I’m not sure if there will be anything Windows-specific that would prompt such browser restrictions, as the curriculum appears to be predominantly written in Flash.