What I don't get is why the great Charlie Brady would suggest port forwarding instead of openening:
" ...search here would tell you there's no point in opening ports on the SME server. You just need to port forward. There's a panel for doing that..."
As far as I understand firewalling, port opening is open a port without (packet)filtering, this means that everything is forwarded without any check of content.
So if instead of opening you could also do a portforwarding to you're internal ip of the SME server.
You're second question, i don't know, what i did, on my router I changed the listening port and redirect it to 22, it works fine for me.
Ronald