irotsoma

If the meter is plugged into the UPS, then the UPS has nothing to do with the power flowing into the meter. Power is “pulled” not “pushed” to devices in that a device supplying power can limit the amount of power provided, but can’t increase it beyond what the devices request.

Just like with plumbing. The water company can’t force your faucets to open and use more water. Now they could increase pressure and break pipes, similarly the UPS could provide the wrong voltage and short or burn out wires or devices causing them to draw more, but that is unlikely to be the issue here. As long as voltage is constant, amperage (the other component in wattage) is pulled, not pushed.

What you’re seeing in the input load, if it matches what is flowing out of the meter, is some device requesting more power and thus more power flowing into the UPS to be passed to those devices, not the UPS forcing something to use power which isn’t possible as explained above, or the UPS itself using power because the meter has no connection to what power is being used by the UPS, only things plugged into the meter.

So, there must be something else using the power. Likely the devices, even if they aren’t really doing anything you consider significant, are doing something. Probably maintenance, checking for updates, the monitoring proceses requesting information from the devices since the TrueNAS server is on that end, etc. You’d need to put a meter on each device to determine what is drawing the power specifically.

Also, does the power meter only display power used by devices plugged into it, or does it also display it’s own power usage? Could be that the plug itself is using WiFi or something to communicate with external services to log that data. But that would be quick bursts.

Also, without putting a meter on each device, this is probably cumulative. For example, if the NAS is requesing info for monitoring the network, that would spin up the processors on the RPi an cause the switch to draw more power as it transmits that information across the network. Again, this should only be small bursts, but it’s also possible the devices are not sleeping properly after whatever process wakes them so they continue to run their processors at higher amperage for some time. Tweaking power profiles can help with something like tuned on Linux or similar to make things sleep more agressively. With the drawback that they take some amount of time to spin back up when needed.

It you’re talking about TOTP exclusively, that only needs the secret and the correct time on the device. The secret is cached along with the passwords on the device.

LLMs are perfectly fine, and cool tech. Problem is they’re billed as being actual intelligence or things that can replace humans. Sure they mimic humans well enough, but it would take a lot more than just absorbing content to be good enough at it to replace a human, rather than just aiding them. Either the content needs to be manually processed to add social context, or new tech needs to be made that includes models for how to interpret content in every culture represented by every piece of content, including dead cultures who’s work is available to the model. Otherwise, “hallucinations” (e.g. misinterpretation and thus miscategorization of data) will make them totally unreliable without human filtering.

That being said, there many more targeted uses of the tech that are quite good, but always with the need for a human to verify.

There’s not a need to have vaultwarden up all of the time unless you use new devices often or create and modify entries really often. The data is cached on the device and kept encrypted by the app locally. So a little downtime shouldn’t be a big issue in the large majority of cases.