Deactivate NTP via DBUS

Product support
1

I want to deactivate the NTP in the Host OS and only activate it manually (to avoid corruption of my RTC).

I found this line of code to query the timedatectl properties:

DBUS_SYSTEM_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/host_run/dbus/system_bus_socket \  
  dbus-send \
  --system \
  --print-reply \
  --reply-timeout=2000 \
  --type=method_call \
  --dest=org.freedesktop.timedate1 \
  /org/freedesktop/timedate1  \
  org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.GetAll \
  string:"org.freedesktop.timedate1

and I want to modify it to call the method SetNTP that i found the the timedated freedesktop documentation.

How do i modify the DBUS command to call the method SetNTP and how do I pass the parameter true or false?

4

+1

5

This doesn’t answer the question, but it it helps, since this thread was created we’ve added more details to the documentation regarding time management on balenaOS:

I am reaching out to the OS team in case they have further advice. For example, it’s possible to specify a list of NTP servers via the ntpServers entry in config.json, and I wonder what happens if invalid servers are specified…

8

We are using chrony as the NTP daemon for quite a while now.
I guess it could be possible to ask the hostOS systemd via dbus to disable the chrony daemon if needed. That should disable NTP.

10

Hi there,

Would you mind detailing a little bit more about the concern with running NTP with an RTC? I have not heard of NTP disciplining an RTC causing corruption issues, and would love to learn more about your use case or this failure mode.