[SunHELP] strange date in /var/adm/messages

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: "Connolly, Michael - EC Newton" <Michael.Connolly at itt.com>
" 
" Ultra Enterprise II
" Solaris 2.6 105181-12 (don't laugh)
" 
" U2 serves up 2 legacy apps to just a few users. This morning the apps had failed but the box seemed fine. No failures from prtdiag, could bseeb all the disks using format BUT iostat showed 27 transport errors with 3 hard errors on 2 disks. So I look in /var/adm/messages and see:
" 
" 
" 
" Mar  6 17:30:46 yoda unix: WARNING: /sbus at 1f,0/SUNW,fas at e,8800000 (fas0):
" Mar  6 17:30:46 yoda unix: 	external SCSI bus reset
" Dec 30 19:00:01 yoda unix: WARNING: /sbus at 1f,0/SUNW,fas at e,8800000 (fas0):
" Dec 30 19:00:01 yoda unix: 	target 0: failed reselection (not in msgin phase)
" Dec 30 19:00:01 yoda unix: WARNING: /sbus at 1f,0/SUNW,fas at e,8800000/sd at 0,0 (sd0):
" Dec 30 19:00:01 yoda unix: 	SCSI transport failed: reason 'reset': retrying command
" Dec 30 19:00:00 yoda unix:
" 
" Note the Dec 30 19:00:00 date and time going BACKWARDS! Now, this is an old U2 b could this be battery related?

it would be good to know dec 30 of which year.  if the batt is really
dead it should be 1969.  [00:00:00 1/1/1970 modulo gmt-5]

the fact it suddenly happened while running suggests some other sort
of hw or sw failure to me...  in my limited experience, the batt has
an extremely long virtually shelf life if the machine is on 24x7.
it's only really drawn on when the machine is off, if you leave the
rtc running.

just fyi i don't know how to stop it on ultras, but the sunhelp.org
nvram faq tells how for some older sparcs.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought