Thanks for those references. I understand that W:0/0 is not recommended but at this point I just need to get something to work. I am familiar with Awesome Miner but I want to build my own software and I plan on open sourcing it. In any case, I did exactly what was recommended in the last resource you pointed me to and I still get denied access to the switchpool command. Very frustrating. Any other ideas? Again I am accessing the network where the miner resides through a VPN. My software so far works perfectly with this setup. It's just the switchpool command that is giving me issues. Here is my bmminer.conf:
{
"bitmain-freq": "550",
"multi-version": "1",
"bitmain-use-vil": true,
"api-groups": "A:stats:pools:devs:summary:version:noncenum",
"pools": [{...}],
"api-listen": true,
"api-allow": "W:0/0, W:*",
"api-network": true
}