Firewall settings and MCX

A buddy of mine asked me about this and my answer does not seem to have worked. Is there a tested/proven way to set the firewall using MCX? I suggested pulling the appropriate Plists into workgroup manager and working with them there. That apparently did not work. So... anyone got experience with this? (Gneagle?) knowmad fyi the settings can be done as a one-off during build with the[code] #change status of the firewall: 0=off 1=on for specific services and 2=on for essential services sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf globalstate -int 1[/code] routine.