I've got a physical bit of tin that I'm playing around with. It has a livecd booted. I ssh into it, enter chroot, happy days.
I've been trying to install tmux, but libevent just wouldn't finish configuring. I had forgetten about it and left over the weeked. Found it still running (probably in loops) this morning. Quick websearch did not yield anything obvious, thought I'd sync the repo in hopes it was an ebuild issue. That threw up on me with SSL errors, complaining the certs are not valid, yet. This was the hint I needed. After setting the correct time the build went through in seconds.
I don't understand why it got in the way in the first place, but I guess it's not something people would run into all that often. Something to keep in mind, though!