@Cooper, Thanks for the tip, I'm still havimg trouble understanding what to do next here so I think its time I take a step back and regroup. I'm going to spend some time looking at the videos from pentestacademy. I think its my lack of understanding of shellcoding/exploit writing that is causing me some issues here. I've only taken a CEH class from the infosec institute which mainly focused on basics of hacking and using Metasploit. If something in those videos jump out at me and I solve my issue I will let you know.