initiate personal firewall and apply config files

3 items; how does one go about initiating the personal-firewall the first time for suse8.0? Yast2 will start configuration for suseFirewall2 but there isn't any source help for initiating the personal firewall. calling it from /sbin does nothing. Second, I need to configure certain /etc files, for instance I want only certain local users in access.conf. When I make the changes the system doesn't recognize that the files have been changed. Likewise I tried setting su to group wheel for admin only and chmod to 4750 so only wheel can use it, and on reboot it allows everyone to attempt login again, it reset itself. thanks, Susan