Good news- got everything to work. So after 6 months of having to hard connect the laptop to the repeater, when I connected repeater directly to the router, everything worked. It was the lame D-link green Ethernet switch that was causing the problem and preventing repeater from talking to the router. Ridiculous but thanks FlyingDiver for helping figure this out. Thankfully I have a few Ethernet ports to spare on the router. But what if you don't? Are there recommended switches that are known to work?