At first I was trying to move around my system under my user that I made and that didnt work obviously since it just has user permissions.. so, i typed su then it asked for the password so I typed that in.. then i was under root@localhost myname.. and tried again to go to /etc/hosts.allow and still permission denied.

I then tried sudo -i and then i was under root@localhost and figured i could access it then! But no, permission denied again.. even going to a different part like /etc/dumpdates still get permission denied...

So what am I doing wrong here? I am just trying to get familiar with how everything is set up so any help would be appreciated.

I figured it out... SOLVED lol

/etc/hosts.allow is a text file. You can't execute it, you have to open it with the text editor of your choice.