Just to be clear, you’re upset with pfSense so your solution is to spend money on pfSense…

Move to OPNsense if you like but I’m unclear what that has to do with changing the function of your switch. Why are you considering that?

None, stop trying to hyper-converge everything. Synology makes nice storage boxes and their apps for backup are solid too. Leave it at that.

Check for firmware updates to the network card AND the UPS.

I had an issue recently where my 5PXG2 was claiming the batteries had failed after less than a year. I talked to support and they said update. As soon as I did, the errors cleared and the UPS started UPS-ing again.

Those are three separate products and the names haven’t changed. While there are multiple tiers of each and more stuff included in the bundles than I mentioned, the general breakdown is:

EO is email only

O365 is Office + Email

M365 is Windows + Office + Email

OP could probably use EO with 5 users and 10 shared mailboxes. Granting the 5 users Full Access to the mailboxes they need would meet their needs.

Very few people need a “router”, Cisco or otherwise. Unless you’re doing BGP with full tables, building a bunch of GRE tunnels, or have some advanced traffic shaping needs, it’s probably not the right tool.

If you’re studying for a CCNA, NP, or IE then you might want to look into renting a lab or virtualizing one. That will be far more cost effective.

If your needs are business-oriented with a budget but don’t fall into the list I gave above, consider Fortinet or Palo Alto. Without a meaningful budget, OPNsense is probably the way to go.

I would not, under any circumstances, recommend Ubiquiti.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say you don’t actually need or want a Cisco router.

Why are you asking about one? What are your requirements? What type of environment?

Assuming this isn’t user error, where you have your Server plugged into outlets that are only surge protected and not battery powered, you have it backwards. Your server, or more specifically the power supplies, power controller, and the BMC (if you have one), aren’t DRAWING any power from your UPS because they don’t consider it clean enough to use. The UPS doesn’t “give” anything.

Check to make sure you’re using ports that are powered under battery and if so your options are to get a new UPS that generates a pure sine wave, get a new server that doesn’t care, or just plug it straight into the wall and know that it will shut down during a power outage.

I get that it happens with both. What I’m telling you to do is to put one on battery and completely kill the power to the other.

If the PSUs are alerting because they don’t like your budget UPS but they still work then fine, that’s annoying. If they’re shutting down because they REALLY don’t like it then the UPSs aren’t doing anything aside from making your setup less efficient and you don’t actually have any backup during a power loss.

Some systems don’t like simulated sine waves.

You need to test what happens if you unplug the second PSU because it’s possible the first is shutting down on what it considers an invalid input. You might not actually have any redundancy.

Is your UPS a stepped sine wave or a true sine wave?

Does the alarm go away if you completely unplug the other PSU? Does the server keep running if you do or does it shut down?

What you’re doing wrong is using an old server without any kind of hardware assist.

What are you trying to accomplish here? How many simultaneous transcodes? Any 4K? If you have subs, are they all SRT?

That’s not a thing, fires can happen with ANY electronics, and outside of a model with a specific design flaw this is exceptionally rare.