Thanks for bringing that up, tried to telnet to both ports and everything seems fine, tried on putty too and the connection seems fine, the weird thing is that the miner sees the pool difficulty but the miner shows dead, none of the ports is blocked, ckpool server is reachable, but the miner won't mine, I asked him to flash a different firmware, no luck, so i assumed that his gear is incompatible with ckpool, but he mentioned having the same problem with a different miner and a different router!, I will remote log-in to test the other miner tonight or tomorrow (whenever he contacts me) to gather more details.