First off WPA is crap encryption for some time now, would do at least WPA2 if it is supported (unless you don't care about neighbors hijacking your signal). Just to give you an idea, here is a chart on the number of passwords per second that can be cracked from WPA.



Just to make sure I'm understanding you, if you turn on all boxes and let DHCP assign addresses, you run ifconfig/iwconfig to get the IP addresses for each box's connection.

Then if you are on a wireless box, you can ping and ssh a wired one, but you can't do the opposite? Also, no setting on the router is blocking pings (usually access your router config with 192.168.1.1 assuming 192.168.*.* network). I just want to make sure we are on the same page before I start pointing you in the wrong directions.