On Tue, Dec 19, 2023 at 06:57:52PM -0500, Daniel Rodriguez wrote: > I want to understand the purpose of a service that I found on my personal > PC. it's mason.service,
=> http://www.stearns.org/mason/mason-2.html It's a tool for building firewall rules based on typical traffic. But as far as I can tell it's only to run with manual monitoring and configuration, so if you don't know why it's there there's no point running it or having it installed. > I don't have a firewall, it's a simple personal PC, Networked Linux is typically shipped with the ability to understand and enforce firewall rules - that means you have firewall features - but if you're behind a port-blocking home router it's probably not worth setting those rules up. This is most likely the setup you have, but you can check with ip addr Your ethernet or wifi probably has a 192.168.x.x local-only address, which means you only get incoming traffic through NAT, which means you also have a firewall. If you're connected directly to the public Internet (shockingly rare in these days) you wouldn't. When you get upgraded to IPv6 you'll get a real global address with no NAT (no NAT for native 6-to-6 traffic) but typically home routers still give you a strict firewall.
