apparently,after following the guide, in doing the v.patch, i would end up with data on different layers. i would have the connectors on layer 1 and the streets on layer 0. I still dont know why it was doing this, but the function would not recognize the streets as being topologically connected, or i was inputting it wrong.
after doing v.patch, i had to use v.category to change the arc layers. meaning i moved them from 1 to 0 so that they were all in one layer. i dont know what the command is to view data layers in grass, but i was able to tell they were not on the same layer with QGIS. i wasnt doing anything with the database connection via layers so i dont know why the out put from v.patch was doing this.
i got it to work with 2 points on a subset of the streets with connectors. when i ran it on 208 points, it took 4 days to run and errored out with
GRASS_INFO_ERROR(18036, 1): terminal at node 1 cannot be connect at terminal node 2.
number of terminals: 207
number of steiner points set to 205.