I'd like to suggest that redhat fix the date problem on alphas. Unfortunately I have an alpha box running 5.2 which was built back east. It was purchased with the idea of using it as a web server, unfortunately with the dearth of software and the linux problems with dbm, we've decided to go with a sun box for the web server. Recently with the demise of my free-bsd mail server I decided to give the alphalinux box another try as a mail server. Everything went fine until I changed the timezone and time according to the scanty documentation. I'm sure you're aware of the 19 year offset problem so I won't go into the details.I had assumed that this was fixed in 6 but from the emails I'm getting it obviously isn't.
simply set the 'boot from arc console' flag and it should be OK...
Unless of course you have a Jensen. It seems the older ARC firmware versions have a 20 year offset bug that can't be fixed. You can still set the clock via "-A", and the month/day/time will be OK, but the year will always be 20 years in the future. Nothing can be done about this other than to fix the firmware.