Thank you, eleuthria.

I just finished reading ck's work around (hack) for the firmware.  He also mentioned it may be a little late at this point in production to fix the hardware issue.  It's rather disappointing news.  I'm not sure what to do at the moment.  I'll have to think on it a while.  I want at least 22 to 25 TH's mining here at my house with as little power consumption as possible.  I liked the sound of the S4 until now.  I'm just not sure anymore.

If I remember correctly, aren't you owner or co-owner of btcGuild?  If so, does your pool allow me to adjust/set the minimum starting level to avoid this issue with the S4?  I know GHash has this ability but I would rather do the guild than hash.

Thank you very much!!!

I'm NEW to mining [September 22, 2014] BUT MOTIVATED!  I have 10 S3's hashing at the moment and 6 more S3's will arrive Friday or Saturday along with PSU's.  I only want to get 8 Bitmain S4's to bring me up to a total of 23.7 TH's and 16,520 watts at the wall in my house.  Looking for a warehouse or something for later to expand my mining farm.

I've only done BTC Guild, Slush, CK'sPool and GHash.  I'm NOT a hopper.  I've just registered and tried several different pools to see what they were like.  I obviously did not look at the "worker" configuration in your pool enough to notice the Diff setting OR I just don't remember it.  I know Slush adjusts automatically and probably starts low then builds up like you said.  So, I know now I will not be pointing S4's towards Slush.

Thanks again for your help!!!

LOL... no, you didn't find 3 blocks, you got 3 accepted shares.  ckpool uses variable difficulty that starts at 1024 and adjusts according to the hash rate of your miners.  Since you're CPU mining (dear lord in heaven what are you thinking???), it just happened to take that long to find a difficulty 1024 share.  Today you got lucky and found a share at least 1024 difficulty, so likely the pool has now adjusted the difficulty to match your abysmal hashing speed from the CPU.

Seriously... what are you thinking?  Do you just not like your server, or are you doing some kind of extended CPU burn in testing?  Nothing good can come of CPU mining BTC.  Of course, now that I've written this, that CPU will probably be the next block finder on the pool...

Maybe you can set it up with a unique worker name and give me the worker name and I can dig into the logs to see if there's anything obvious poolside.

I looked at it and the share log is consistent with something hashing at 250ish GH and there is nothing untowards going on in terms of rejects or invalids or anything that I can make out.

That was initially. Now it does appear to have died or something. It's dropped your diff all the way down to 1 now the hashrate is so low...

It dropped your diff from 1024 to 192 here (meaning it felt it was about 250GH):
Then it went downhill, still delivering only the same number of shares even though diff kept dropping:

Hardly any shares are coming in even though it's now at diff 1. So for whatever reason it seems to be behaving as though it's still at the original diff. Not sure what your client version software/driver etc. are, but that's how I see that behaviour.

Every share is still over 1024 diff:

No idea, but it's downstream from the pool. However, if it wasn't clear, it is still hashing at 242 GH, it's just not submitting any shares below the diff it gets when it starts, which means that only the stats are wrong, but your chance of finding a block with this hardware are still the same 1 in a trillion or whatever they are for 242 GH.

You mean would their hashrate be higher? Absolutely not, at least not on this or any other ckpool.

Though I did test this with a bitmain representative starting at diff1 and confirmed ckpool is still okay even starting at diff 1.

Ckpool is getting everything out from the miners, only time fans sometimes gets quiet for a few sec is just after a block is found, but on some other pools its different with less than 30sec blocktime, the ants openwrt board is just not enough to handle that. If there just would be an usb port to bypass openwrt..