The following reply was made to PR port-cobalt/30405; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: port-cobalt-maintainer@NetBSD.org, gnats-admin@NetBSD.org,
	netbsd-bugs@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: port-cobalt/30405: can't make network connect with date set before 1970
Date: Thu, 2 Jun 2005 21:05:18 +0200

 On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 02:13:00PM +0000, lordjebus@gmail.com wrote:
 > >Number:         30405
 > >Category:       port-cobalt
 > >Synopsis:       can't make network connect with date set before 1970
 > >Confidential:   no
 > >Severity:       non-critical
 > >Priority:       low
 > >Responsible:    port-cobalt-maintainer
 > >State:          open
 > >Class:          sw-bug
 > >Submitter-Id:   net
 > >Arrival-Date:   Thu Jun 02 14:13:00 +0000 2005
 > >Originator:     Joe Pribele
 > >Release:        1.6.1
 > >Organization:
 > >Environment:
 > NetBSD codemonkey 1.6.1 NetBSD 1.6.1 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Jun 26 22:22:53 CEST 2003     cdi@merlin.camelot.net:/misc/home/cdi/src/netbsd/1.6.1/src/sys/arch/cobalt/compile/GENERIC cobalt
 > >Description:
 > if you have a date set before 1970 you can't make any network connects to anything. You can still connect to the box and make dns lookups. However you can't even ping 127.0.0.1 it sends no packets
 
 I ran into this. It's not an issue with the networking stack, but with ping
 (or, rather, a time-related function in ping). 
 It's probably safe to say that running with a date before 1970 isn't supported
 (and the system should reset the date to Jan, 1 1970 if it finds such a
 date at boot).
 
 -- 
 Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
      NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
 --