Date problems on noname/potato

[Julien Stern <stern@lri.fr>]

Hi all,

The time on my good ol' alpha machine is suddently very strange:
It changes every second :)

Here is the output of a few date commands, typed consecutively:
> julien@titania:~$ date
> Wed Jan  7 15:08:56 CET 1970
> julien@titania:~$ date
> Fri Jan  2 00:19:44 CET 1970
> julien@titania:~$ date
> Wed Jan  7 01:35:08 CET 1970
> julien@titania:~$ date
> Mon Jan 12 03:55:37 CET 1970
> julien@titania:~$ date
> Tue Jan  6 03:04:13 CET 1970
> julien@titania:~$ date
> Thu Jan  1 01:16:16 CET 1970

It seemed to me that it occured when I upgraded from slink to potato,
but I might be wrong (I don't use my alpha very often).
Trying to set the date doesn't change anything.
Any clue on what may cause this?

I though it might be some kind of hardware problem.
Is there a clock battery in the multia that might have to be changed?

Misc info:
- The box is a multia (noname)
- OS is potato
- RTC seems OK from the log :

Real Time Clock Driver v1.09
rtc: ARC console epoch (1980) detected

Thanks,
Julien