Hi,

First time Linux user here trying to get ssh up and running. Well ... it's up and running but I can't seem to allow and deny ssh connections with the hosts.allow and hosts.deny files.

I compiled ssh with libwrap and from what I understood of the output it found the necessary libwrap packages.

Have the following packages installed:
pi libwrap0 7.6-9 Wietse Venema's TCP wrappers library
ii libwrap0-dev 7.6-9 Wietse Venema's TCP wrappers library, develo

I installed ssh-3.2.9.1 and am running kernel 2.4.18-bf2.4 ( I think )
hosts.deny only has the ALL : ALL line in it and hosts.allow has no ssh line but I can still connect to the host.

Hope someone can point me in the right direction.

You mean in hosts.deny, you have the line :
sshd : ALL : deny ?

Not sure why you needed to compile ssh, the binary you get from Debian is already compiled againts libwrap.a

Nope ... hosts.deny only has one line:
ALL : ALL

I was under the impression that I need to compile just about any program I download. Downloaded the zipped file from ssh.com, unzipped, compiled with libwrap and so on ...

Uninstalled ssh today and got it again with apt-get ssh which stopped ssh connections from other machines. Thing is that it still wouldn't react when I added

sshd : .some.local.network

to the hosts.allow file. Sooo ... I uninstalled it and reverted to the previous ssh version