Fedora Core 15...CMOS battery

Ran across a curious situation... Was installing FC15 (use the net install image to get all the updates during install) on a system with a drained CMOS battery. 

The install would fail:"Unable to read package metadata"/"Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository".

From FC15 install

Switching to a VT and using wget revealed the problem : the SSL certificate for the repository could not be validated as the date on the system was incorrect - 2006. Fixing the date (date -s 'YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS-HH:MM') was all that was needed.