You're going to need a different recoil spring. The standard AR15/M16 rifle or carbine springs are both inadequate. ARES sells carbine springs for their Shrike/MCR, but they don't sell a rifle spring. You will need an MG34 spring for your rifle buffer tube, and you'll need to cut it down to somewhere between 29 and 35 loops. I suppose the standard rifle buffer will work but IDK for sure as I've never tried that. I run a kyn-shot hydraulic rifle buffer and my bud runs a Colt LMG hydraulic buffer on his and we're both pretty happy. We both run cut-down MG34 springs. The spring is very important because it has to strip the round out of the link, and that's no easy thing.
Start with a full length MG34 spring and a single round in a magazine. If you can't get the buffer seated with the full length spring, then remove a few loops until you can install the buffer. Shoot and see if the bolt locks back on the empty mag. Remove loops in the spring until it reliably locks back on the last round in a magazine, and now your spring is tuned.
And for ammo, you'll pretty much need 5.56 ammo to make it run reliably.
For links - the Shrike/MCR can be very picky about links. Some people lube their links - oil them. This is effective, but now you have oily links and they attract dirt which isn't good for anything. I've had success tumbling my new links in corn cob and car was overnight. It knocks down the rough/textured parkerize finish on the links and smooths them up a bid. I've thought about running links through my SS media thinking it would really knock down that parkerize finish, but haven't done it yet. Also, a guy at Knob Creek sells link stretchers. Word is that this solution works great but I haven't tried it yet.