Hey everyone, heres an update:

I'm at the 97% mark and just wanted to ask a quick question:

I have wireless transparent bridging setup, and my laptop acts as an extension of the ap. my other computer can see my laptops network, join it, and traffic makes it all the way across the bridge in my laptop over to the connected computer. The only problem is it seems that no other hosts can communicate with the default gateway ( the actual ap ). broadcasts are seen (via wireshark), and i can see network traffic. But when a connected host requests and address via dhcp, no reply from the default gw. when i statically assign an ip and try to ping the default gw, there is only an arp request for 192.168.1.1, no responce. So it seems like nothing can communicate with the default gw other than my laptop.

i found out at linuxfoundation.org  that :
"This is a known problem, and it is not caused by the bridge code. Many wireless cards don't allow spoofing of the source address. It is a firmware restriction with some chipsets."
So it seems maybe my card cannot spoof its MAC.

i can use dhclient and get an ip address for br0 when it is using the same MAC as wlan0 ( the interface connected to the "office" ap ), but when i use macchanger and set it to my ath0 (interface used as an "extension") dhclient fails to receive an ip.

So i'm thinking that only the mac associated w/ the "office" ap can communicate w/ the default gw, apparently being associated with me and then being bridged accross does not work (unless i have a prism chipset according to linuxfoundation.org)

So...should I use NAT to take all the traffic from ath0(ap mode) and make it look like its coming from me. again using the bridge and everything. so basically all this requires is wireless transparent bridging and NAT?

does that make sence, is that the best way to go about it? also, any point in the right direction to a specific NAT program or site would be great as i've never set up NAT on my box before.

thanks everyone i really appreciate the help, sorry for the length, thanks!