> I have NetBSD 1.5.2 installed on an MVIII (KA650 in a BA23 chassis). When I
> booted it after about 3 months of down time, it complained about the TODR being
> too small and asked that the date be checked and set. When I tried to set the
> date, it accepted the command, presented a new prompt, and then would not
> respond to any more commands. The characters typed are echoed, but the shell
> does not respond. This was very repeatable. Pings would respond, but I did not
> get a longin prompt over SSH. After killing ntpd, I used ntpdate to set the date
> and that was successful.
> 
You have stumbled into a real old PR: realitexpire() hates big time lumps.
http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=2962

So, the problem is well known but nobody has fixed it yet.

-- Ragge