Bastille works.
when I do
/etc/rc.d/init.d/bastille-firewall start
it starts.
when I do
iptables --list
it lists.
all good.
but what I cant figure out is this:
what is the recommended process for adding hosts to deny access? I have found a very roundabout screwy way of doing it, but whats the preferred/recommended way?

You can use iptables to deny all access from a specific host with:
iptables -I INPUT -s xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -j DROP

If you would like to deny access to only certain services, then you will need to provide more details about what you are trying to accomplish. You can alternatively use host.deny, however it only is functional for certain services.

Thanks for the reply.
sorry, I wasnt clear.
If I run the iptables command line that you suggested, it works. But if I then startup bastille, it flushes the iptables before it loads its own. I could then run the command line you suggest, but I was wondering if there is a best practice for this? Is the best practice just having a script run all of my iptables blocks after I start bastille?

edit:
one more thing...
if I run
/etc/rc.d/init.d/iptables start
it will load my iptables that I saved, but this flushes what bastille put in.

I don't use bastille that much, so I'm not really that familiar with it. But I would imagine that you could do this several ways. The easiest would be to take a look at the bastille-firewall script in initd and see if you can find the location that it grabs the firewall rules from. Then just append your desired rules to the bottom of it (though make sure to use -I option). Alternatively you could put all your rules in a separate executable file and modify the bastille script to execute that file after it finishes loading its own rules.

Looking at the bastille docs, it looks like it pulls the rules from /etc/Bastille/bastille-firewall.cfg.