Hey Guys.
I live and work on a university campus which allows our apartments connectivity to the campus network and Internet via a Web Proxy. Naturally we are in an Active Directory Domain on Windows Server 2012 RC2, and my home PC is joined to the domain. Our apartment building is around 16 years old, and the network equipment is probably 12 or 13 years old using CAT5 100Mb hubs and/or switches to each apartment, thus from apartment to each floor’s hub/switch is max speed of 100Mb/s.
So, my apartment is a network intensive bandwidth user unlike most other lecturers as I’m a computer engineer and have a tendency to use a lot of equipment connected to our network. Until the EX4 that had not been a problem. There are 3 PCs (2 of them are WiFi while my main PC is hardwired), PlayStation 4 (hardwired), Samsung SMART HDTV (WiFi), and any mobile devices all connected to this 100Mb/s RJ45 CAT5 port. All of these said devices can access anything on the network but must login to our Web Proxy via a browser to gain access to the Internet. This means the EX4 cannot see the Internet, but that is fine as I am only concerned with it being accessible to all devices inside my apartment, though I can access it from any point on our campus, just not via Internet unless using VPN.
To connect all these devices to the one RJ45 port I am using a TP-Link 5-port 1Gb switch and a TP-Link Dual Band WiFi router. The switch is connected to the RJ45 port with a CAT 6e cable which flashes amber showing 100Mb/s, the WiFi is connected to the switch, as is my PC and LAN 1 of the EX4. The PlayStation 4 and LAN 2 of the EX4 are connected to the WiFi router. All cables are CAT 6e and the switch flashes green for 1Gb/s on every device. As expected, bandwidth has taken a hit with so many devices, but until the EX4 was installed I still got 20Mb/s downloads and uploads, while after I’m lucky to get 2Mb/s download speeds, the upload remains above 10Mb/s. Go figure. 
As you might expect, our domain runs DHCP and every building uses a different subnet which defines location, such as my apartment building is no. 5, so our IP gateway is 10.38.5.1, building 6 is 10.38.6.1.
After writing the technical novela (sorry), my reason for posting is to see why the EX4 stops being seen by any device inside my apartment connected to the 5-port Gigabit switch when our building gateway goes down? From my PC I can still see other devices in our building but I can’t access the campus network as long as the gateway is down. So is it a configuration issue, a limitation to having EX4 connected in a domain environment, etc.? Any thoughts, ideas, solutions would be HIGHLY appreciated as all my media resides on the EX4 and when the gateway goes down I can’t watch any of the TV or Movies stored there.
Active Directory is not turned on, and I have assigned a static IP address so I always know how to access it manually. Local Master Browser is turned off since it is not intended to be used across multiple subnets. The only way I usually access the EX4 is via Windows Explorer.
Thanks HUGELY, and again, my apologies for such a detailed and long post.
Cole
