General connection issues with dat

[despens]

I am having issues connecting to any dat:// data sets using the latest and any previous Beaker versions. I am running two homebase version 2 instances, one on a VPS and another on my cable internet studio network and they are happily exchanging and syncing data. However, no beaker version, neither from the 0.8 or the current 1.0beta releases, as well as the latest release of the dat desktop client, finds the data sets, no difference if I'm in the same network as the local homebase or not. Is there any way to "force add" a peer IP address to a dat swarm, or other ways to debug what's going on on either end?