Well I found a significant source of my problems with these decTOPs.
Hardware clock is back at Jan 2006. And many things fail.....
And there is no way to access the bios from a boot sequence.
On the one I discovered this, I watched everything get errors during all the reboots a Trixbox install goes through.
Once I was allowed to log in, I ended using
date
to set the system date and
hwclock
to use the system date to fix the hardware clock.
Thanks!