It appears   to be working now. knock on wood.. holding rabbit foot..   crossing eyes...  i mean fingers..  


 So I want to share what was stopping it from working if someone else decides to set up a pool.

This will fix problems with connecting to the pool
ports open.. but receiving stratum errors

and miners not getting paid.
Behavior is repeated logs of "No workers' balances reached the minimum payment threshold" even though should have.



in the cryptonote mining pool default distro you need to fix the package.json file


in package.json file

replace this section
        
       "dependencies": {
        "bignum": "*",
        "async": "*",
        "redis": "*",
        "cli-color": "*",
        "dateformat": "*",
        "base58-native": "*",
        "multi-hashing": "git://github.com/fancoder/node-multi-hashing.git",
        "cryptonote-util": "git://github.com/fancoder/node-cryptonote-util.git"
    }


With this line

      

    "dependencies": {
    "bignum": "0.12.5",
        "async": "1.5.2",
        "redis": "0.12.1",
   "cli-color": "1.1.0",
        "dateformat": "1.0.12",
       "base58-native": "0.1.4",
        "multi-hashing": "git://github.com/fancoder/node-multi-hashing.git",
        "cryptonote-util": "git://github.com/forknote/node-cryptonote-util.git"
    }


do this after you clone from git (so you have the files to edit)
and before you run npm update (so it downloads the right repository)

If you have already ran npm update..  delete node_modules folder and run again