I had a look at my problems setting time and date; now it works.
The reasons were:
1. The program "clock" does not work at all.
But: It isn't needed anyway, the kernel gets the time and date
on its own.
So: Take the call out of your /etc/rc.d files.
2. Older versions of the SRM console (probably < 1.2) use a different
coding for the year; upgrading SRM or defining the necessary
kernel constant (see arch/alpha/.../time.*) helps.
Regards,
Ville