Hi, are you working off a particular guide? when you say wallet, I am assuming you mean feathercoind (daemon)?
I use a solo p2pool for the extra information / hash sharing it, BUT I would assume you do not want to “pay into” the wallet on the miner, but one on a separate machine. In fact, I think you can set no wallet for security.
Any more information like the actual miners you used, GPU, OS etc would probably help diagnose what you need to do.
You can easily try opening the required ports (on you router), the miners are uPNP, so they do try to open a port out, if you’ve got that allowed.
Mining has got technically easier than it used to be, I’ll be interested to see how you get on. Good luck