If I understood correctly, you already hard-forked SMC? If yes, LOL, you shouldn't do it like that! You need to set some future block height an give miners enough time to
upgrade to newest version of the wallet. Unless 51% hashpower is using that newest version of the wallet things will go wrong and many will be really pissed once they find
out they've been mining on abandoned blockchain for days or weeks. Terracoin had 3 hard-forks in very short period of time and network is still in complete chaos due to
many miners or mere users of TRC never upgrading, upgrading once or twice but not three times.
For some updates (e.g. difficulty adjustment algorithm) that would be the proper way. Here the problem is that a few thousand peers of foreign nodes need to get out as fast as possible -- so I opted for this radical update-path.
Is there a node running the new update I can manually add to see if I can maintain a connection to it with my newly compiled build? I can't even maintain a connection between the new version and the old version between my two virtual machines, which has me wondering if the two versions can talk to each other.
that's the unfortunate side effect: the new and the old version will not talk to each other. As already offered, I can make connections to new version nodes if provided here in the thread or via private message.