You dont need a specific node. It'll just work out of the box.
so right now one of the nodes i am connected to is a sync node and the rest not, but i have had this thing open for about an hour and still stuck on block 41220 from about 7 weeks ago when I last synced. otherwise there are 8 outbound connections and 1 inbound atm.
not sure what to do
Did you update to 10.3 as instructed here http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/07/29/3-v0.10.3.html ?
i think that is the version that i downloaded
v0.10.3.0-g56d0e61
last block: Mon Jul 28 21:45:28 2014
got 14 connections at the moment
maybe i should try reinstalling?
Did you follow the instructions though? If you have an old chain, make sure you close qt/viacoind then follow the instruction on the blog.