I am sure that the CMOS battery is dead in this old box and this may be 
related to it, but the error persists even when I restart chronyd after I set 
the date manually:

chronyd[3105]: Fatal error: settimeofday() failed
chronyd[3424]: Could not settimeofday
chronyd[3105]: Fatal error: settimeofday() failed
chronyd[3424]: Fatal error: settimeofday() failed

This is what syslog shows:

Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: chronyd version 1.26 starting
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: Set system time, error in RTC = 
1169296056129876.500000
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: Could not settimeofday
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: Linux kernel major=3 minor=2 patch=1
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: hz=100 shift_hz=7 freq_scale=1.00000000 
nominal_tick=10000 slew_delta_tick=833 max_tick_bias=1000
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: Could not open IPv6 NTP socket : Address 
family not supported by protocol
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: Could not open IPv6 command socket : 
Address family not supported by protocol
Mar  3 13:47:12 lappy chronyd[3424]: Frequency -36.574 +- 0.028 ppm read from 
/etc/chrony/chrony.drift
Mar  3 13:47:21 lappy chronyd[3424]: System trim from RTC = 
1169296066498122.500000
Mar  3 13:47:22 lappy chronyd[3424]: System's initial offset : 
2147481497.991868 seconds fast of true (step)
Mar  3 13:47:22 lappy chronyd[3424]: Fatal error : settimeofday() failed

Should I worry about this?
-- 
Regards,
Mick