hello again,

> >   I did date experiments with an U10: I set the date
> > from the unix to 2038-01-19T03:14 an let the box run 
> > past the overflow...
> > 
> >   now the U10 won't boot anymore, not even from CD...   :-/


  FINALLY the solution was easier than this: my CD-R of NetBSD-2.0
seemed to be flaky and I cut a new one.

  booting from a healty sparc64cd.iso was a success (no crash/hanger)
and I quickly went to the shell but found no date(1) command

  then I navigated thru the sysinst menus and came to setting the 
timezone: at least here I got a display of heatly date value: 1970

  Stop-A to firmware prompt and:
ok
ok date
01/36/1970 08:07:53  GMT
ok
ok
ok date
01/36/1970 08:13:50  GMT
ok

  huh?  year is ok, but what's that "36"???

  I simply repeated the procedure: reset-all, boot cdrom, utilities menu
  now date was at reasonable value 12/02/2004
  set timezone to GMT, exit, halt system

ok
ok date
12/02/2004 03:01:14  GMT
ok
ok date
12/02/2004 03:06:22  GMT
ok
ok power-off

  fine.

  RESUMING GOOD NEWS:
	- NetBSD/sparc64 2.0 is robust against this case of odd hw-clock
values
	- NetBSD/sparc64 2.0 heals odd hw-clock values (but in my case
needed 2 runs)

  QUESTION:
	- would it be a too high demand to include the date(1) command
onto the install CD, so to have a mean to fix such messy situations?

thanks for support - back on track
Stephan

(for comparison:
  apples OF machines have separate batteries: pull the battery,
reset OF -PRAM-zapping in mac-speak-, reseat battery -> date ok
  PCs have a BIOS thru which a date can be set manually - but who
wants talk PC here? ;-)