Adding an NTPServer to ClockService

[fdizazzo]

Hi all,
just got yet another 'frontier' use case: having devices who can only talk to a Kura-equipped edge gateway but could find a centralized clock syncronization beneficial.
So, could adding a NTP Server into ClockService (or somewhere else into the codebase) be useful/something you're interested in?

After a quick overview of the as-is:

• No additional dependencies are required;
• It would work best with the java-ntp provider, fine with the others;
• It would be disabled by default, for some ease of mind about security I'd leave to a user the creation of the firewall rule.

What do you think? :)

[mattdibi]

Hello there @fdizazzo
I briefly discussed your proposal with @MMaiero and we have couple observations to make.

1. I don't think you strictly need to implement something inside Kura (event though every contribution is welcome 😉) to achieve what you want: spinning up a container with an NTP server inside would probably suffice in your case (excluding performance limitation consideration of course). See cturra/docker-ntp.
2. We don't think the ClockService is a good fit for what you want to achieve: it is meant to be an NTP client (and already quite big in scope due to how many underlying technologies it's leveraging). Adding an NTP server functionality there would be out-of-scope for that particular service.
3. A better way to achieve this would be to create a new standalone component (something called "NTPServerService"). In this case you don't even need to contribute directly to the Kura codebase but can have a separate bundle and distribute it through the Eclipse Marketplace (like we do).

Let me know what you think or if you need any clarification 😄

[mattdibi]

On an unrelated note, have we ever thought about being able to use a GPS to have straight-from-satellite clock synchronization? 🤔

Yup we can leverage the NTPD service for doing so, see API Javadocs. I'm not aware of reference implementations though 🤔 I would need to ask more senior team members for more details.

[mattdibi]

@fdizazzo At today's Kura Dev meeting I was made aware of the APIs exposed by the PositionService interface that allows for retrieving of the date/time through GPS.

For an implementation you can take a look at: https://github.com/eclipse/kura/tree/develop/kura/org.eclipse.kura.linux.position/src/main/java/org/eclipse/kura/linux/position

[fdizazzo]

Thanks! I'll double check if my use case can be implemented with the existing APIs , and/or share a draft PR if not. Sadly no ETA on that 🤔

Also, I think the shared calendar for DevMeetings went out of sync after the holiday break, pointing at the wrong weeks :)

[mattdibi]

Also, I think the shared calendar for DevMeetings went out of sync after the holiday break, pointing at the wrong weeks :)

That would explain the low attendance :D. I'll see what I can do, thanks for reporting the issue :)

[mattdibi]

@fdizazzo We have updated the post with the calendar. Feel free to ping us if you find any problem.

[mattdibi]

Closing this. Feel free to re-open this if needed.