toolology

You can call them CPE or Customer Premise Equipment.

Theoretically, there could be hardware/software running on the device that learns the source/destination IP addresses of frames passing through it and then assigns itself a suitable static IP so you wouldn't see it in your router's DHCP table and then phones home that way.....

Theoretically. You could try to just plug a single computer into it and run wireshark and see if you see anything. Theoretically its possible for it to not broadcast or send its own traffic until a gateway IP is identified and learned but this would be highly theoretical stuff.

I think all in all the effort to create a compromised stealth switch like this would GREATLY outweigh the effort required to create a working switch with a trusted brand name in a crowded market segment. But hey anything's possible when you wear tinfoil on your head.

Is this a windows server? The firewall maybe only be set to respond to pings (icmp echo request) from the local subnet. Its on the scope tab of the firewall rule.

I hate it when my servers are unreasonable

Bad bot

Write a web scraper but don't tell anyone.

There's probably a few already made ones on github

My Ubiquiti Edgerouter has never gone down in the 6 or 7 years i've had it. It's wired only so you would have to buy a separate wireless AP for wifi.

But that's one advantage of separating your router, switch, and wifi devices, usually each dedicated device does it's dedicated job much better than an all-in-one device.

The edgerouter-x is also like 50 bucks on amazon, leaving plenty of budget for a WAP.