CKpool's bitcoind masks those services (even though they're active) except to whitelisted clients because it doesn't want the pools' bitcoin node to waste bandwidth seeding new nodes.
Thanks for confirming, I figured there was some configuration behind it.
For the most part I've never had any issues mining to the pool except over the past couple of weeks where things were behaving oddly.
Like I said there was a run of very low share sizes to the point it became noticable from the norm that i'd been seeing and then the odd dropped share for a while.
Otherwise its been rock solid and all seems to be running just fine presently.
Cheers G.