The Mason HOWTO: Notes about Mason itself

## 9. Notes about Mason itself

## 9.1 File descriptions

COPYING

  The GNU General Public License.

Makefile

  Used in packaging and distribution.

baserules

  The baserules file is one of two files that hold your firewall rules. baserules holds the rules that you've checked over and are sure should be part of your final firewall.

baserules.sample

  A few possible rules for use as a starting point.

firewall

  The boot time script for use in /etc/rc.d/init.d.

index.html

  The Mason web page.

mason

  The actual mason script.

mason-gui-text

  The rudimentary interface to running Mason and building a firewall.

mason-gui-text.1

  man page for mason-gui-text.

mason.1

  man page for mason.

mason.html

  The primary documentation for the package, in hypertext.

mason.lsm

  The Linux Software Map entry.

mason.sgml

  The primary documentation for the package. The sgml format is designed to allow easy conversion to more readable formats.

mason.spec

  The RPM spec file.

mason.txt

  The primary documentation for the package, in a flat text file.

masonlib

  A library of functions used by a number of the other files.

masonrc

  The main configuration file. There are intelligent defaults for all of these fields.

moreservices

  The services file I use, good as a reference if you don't recognize a protocol.

nmap-services

  The additional services file includes with the nmap tool. An even better reference.

newrules

  newrules is the other file that holds firewall rules. It holds rules created by mason that you haven't looked over yet. Think about what would happen if you were port scanned while Mason was running; if you only had one file to hold rules, all of these portscan rules you don't want would be mixed in with the rules you do want.

  An important note - rules in newrules are not part of your regular firewall - they are only used during the learning process. This is why you need to merge rules from newrules to baserules once you're sure of them.