looking through the debug.log I am getting this for said solved blocks
ThreadRPCServer method=submitblock
ERROR: AcceptBlock() : block height mismatch in coinbase
ERROR: ProcessBlock() : AcceptBlock FAILED
ThreadRPCServer method=getblockcount
any ideas on whats going wrong?
It looks like you are finding blocks just fine, the only thing is your miner is finding them after their height already have been mined by somebody else.
This means your miner keeps working on the work it got dispatched for too long before checking whether it is still relevant.
Try to set the upper limit for new work to for example 20 seconds using the expiry argument:
--expiry|-E Upper bound on how many seconds after getting work we consider a share from it stale (default: 120)
Also, if your port is open and the client running, you will be acting as a full node.
You can also check this with:
getpeerinfo
After running the client for a while, you should see some inbound peers coming up ("inbound" : true).