Might be the problem? BTW, what did Evan mean by new hashing algorithm? He didn't change X11, did he? Is there something else that gets hashed now as well? I missed that part, thanks for any clarification. Gotta get back to this later, so sorry!
Dear HammerHead, I didn't see a newer version posted, how do I check my version number? I mean I'm on version 10.11.02 protocolversion 70019. I don't know where to find the "x.x.x.x:18998 instead of 8998 (or 7903)"
Hard drive died, gotta put new one into the main Ubuntu. I stuck it into another machine because I thought the old drive came back to life well enough, LOL, but now I need to finally replace that drive.
The version i was referring to is the version of p2pool, which is currently commit
fac408d. As I type this, tho, I realize that you didn't say you were running a p2pool, only that you were trying to mine on one. In any case, if p2pool is running on testnet, it is using port 18998 instead of port 8998 or port 7903 as on the real network. Because of this, you'd have to point your testnet miner to the the address at port 18998, which is something that I forgot when I was initially setting up a p2pool on testnet.
That said, if you ARE trying to set up a p2pool on an AWS instance, I also wanted to remind you to open port 18998 and 18999 in the security settings as well.
And if you wanted to try to determine if it is a miner config problem or a p2pool config problem, you could try pointing your miner at my testnet p2pool node, which is working at 54.88.172.2:18998. if you can't connect there, it is probably a miner issue, because I can connect from various places to that IP. If you CAN connect to my pool, then your miner is probably not the issue, and you can start working through your p2pool config.

because that's what I ended up doing last night
