Going to re-ask my question here, as I am unsuccessful in the US thread:

I received my starter kit today from MBP with the v2.3 M-board, and wired everything up correctly. The unit did NOT come with an SD card, and I had to download this image and load it to an 8GB microSD with adapter: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zjk90fjra5bwhnd/rPi_V2.img

1) put it in, powered up, and tried to connect to the default ip via chrome, IE, and PUTTY SSH. no luck
2) powered down, and added to the cmdline.txt file:     ip=192.168.1.249     (supposedly the default)
2a) re-tried step 1. chrome and IE quickly return "could not connect" errors, and SSH results in "connection refused"
3) repeat step 2 with 192.168.1.240 in case of IP conflicts. result is same as step 2a

I have no monitor/keyboard at my disposal, so i cant just set up a workstation at my unit. can someone confirm if the image i used is the issue, or point me in a direction of a different image for a v2.3 m-board?

This is racking my brain, keeping me up. I wont be able to try any tweaked methods until tomorrow after work, which means I just missed out on 24hrs of mining because a $5 SD card was not included with my unit.