hosts allow/deny?

In further securing my systems, I wanted to limit access to the services on the gateway machine. This meant tinkering with the files 'hosts.allow' and 'hosts.deny'. But this proved to be harder than I expected, mainly because I have to edit the files, then test if I can SSH in remotely by standing at a remote system. Tedious.., to say the least :|

Update 16.03.2008:

Hehehe, in the end.., turns out all the problems I've had with this part, was caused by the sshd service; not actually running. It was not the service limitations, they work perfectly ;) no revisions needed ;P

sudo /etc/rc.d/rc.sshd start

ps ax | grep 'sshd'
XXXX ? Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd