Sen4CAP... recap

Dear Sen4CAP users,

I’m new to Sen4CAP and my purpose is to test Sen4CAP to generate L3A products (NDVI, LAI, FCOVER, FAPAR), a crop type map, grassland mowing detection, and agricultural practice monitoring (harvesting/clearance week, tillage practice detection) for a season in the past (2019-2020).
I have these data: site(s) AOI; shapefiles of parcels (with parcel ID, holder, crop type).

I installed Sen4CAP on a Virtual Machine and I began using it via GUI. Default Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 source data configuration was only customized with username and password. I created a new site, setting all the available processors for it.

First problem: some Sentinel-1 data were downloaded (“Network history” showed me a lot of downloaded GB), but Sentinel-1 .zip archives were about only a few kB.

Second problem: Sentinel-2 data had never been downloaded. Most of the time those queries were rejected with “Too many requests” message.

Third problem: I can’t upload Declarations to my site: even though my shapefile is valid and well-formatted, I’m always getting the same error: “Error #103: Upload error for file <file_name>.zip : Error preprocessing uploaded file <file_name>.zip for lpis. Error was: Your file is not a valid .zip archive!”

I read the SUM, I read some posts here on the forum, but nothing helped me. And above all, I don’t know where to check for errors in my configuration.
In the end, I’m literally stuck.
Please, can you help me at least to learn where to check if my installation is fully functional for my purposes?
Thanks a lot