If you go to whatismyipaddress.com, is the IP address you see there the same your router tells you as your WAN or public address?

And if it is different, is your routers public address somewhere between 100.64.0.0 and 100.127.255.255?

Could you please try to do a ping for 8.8.8.8?

Could you please try to do a ping for 8.8.8.8?

TL-SG2008 v3 from TP link, while it is managed, you could simply deactivate all extras

Search engine “optimization”

I don’t know about macbooks but in most non-apple devices you can configure Mac passthrough in bios, which would overwrite the dongles mac with the mac of the client. Maybe there is an option for that

You simply have to get two managed switches that support VLANs and setup a trunk port to connect them. That’s not difficult at all.

You have one pipeline to the Internet that is 100 Mbps wide and it doesn’t matter if you put the split of this bandwidth in your router or your switch. At some point all your systems will have to share this 100 Mbps between them.

And this shares are dynamic. If one device currently only uses 10 Mbps, the remaining 90 are free to be used by all the other devices. (highly simplified)

And actually, if your router has more then one lan port, chances are high that this is a switch within your router.

Depends on the situation and distance. If possible, get a Cat6 cable from a reputable brand like monoprice and connect it to your router and PC. If you have some budget to spare, you also could try a flat cat cable to make it easier to get it through doors or under a rug.

Yes it is possible and absolutely viable as a starting point. You might will start experience some drawbacks of hosting on a Windows desktop system more sooner than later. Reboots due to system updates as example.

Use it, and think about getting an use office PC that can hold your drives.

Soon to be in a bad HOA story

A pile of shame, consisting of all the books I bought and haven’t read yet.

Not exactly what I wanted to achieve with my idea, but it seems that my idea is not feasible. But thank you, for your answer.

It depends on your requirements.

If you only need a lot of ports, all on the same subnet, an unmanaged switch will do.

If you are planing to use VLANs or other features a managed switch will come with, then you should get a managed one, if it is within your budget.