At the very tail end of 2024, i was able to take the Certified Ethical Hacker course. It’s been on my bucket list for a while now. I’m still working through some of the labs before i take the second test (the practical exam), but i believe there might be value in talking about what i’ve seen so far.

The Course

I have no complaints about the course. There was a lot of information to be disseminated in a short period of time, around 250 slides per day plus a few practical exercises.

PRTG is the monitoring solution developed by Paessler, a German company. Well, I say German, but they’ve recently been bought by US private equity, which has already led to increased licensing costs.

…We do love private equity.

I, however, don’t love PRTG. I’ve been working with it for a few years now, managing a rather large deployment in my current position, and it’s been an experience. While the UX/UI is acceptable (but only just), there are two major reasons for my disdain.

Too often do i hear my application admin coworkers and some sysadmins even, moan and grumble about certificates. People are always talking about TLS/SSL as if “no one understands this anyway” and “It’s a mystery to me”. I held a talk at my workplace recently where I attempted to demystify TLS/SSL a bit, and maybe someone out there would also be interested in that.

I’m no expert on TLS in any real sense, but i’ve been managing an internal PKI for a while now and looked into the protocol.