> What format is the filesystem in?
VxFS, which (according to Wikipedia) is claimed to be supported by Linux. The HDD is partitioned into several logical volumes. Interestingly enough the LVM utilities have the same command names as Linux LVM2, but I don't know if it follows the same on-disk structure.
It would be really handy if Linux supported something like a loopback virtual disk drive into which you could bind whole disk images (instead of just loop block devices to which you can bind only partition images). Maybe there's some (3rd party) kernel module I don't know about for this.
> Have you got a write up somewhere?
Right now I'm just looking around, what's in the system. There's an ancient C compiler on the system but it does only K&R syntax. All the system utilities apparently have been compiled on an external build system. There's an ancient version of Samba there. For simple file transfers I made me a netcat binary by pasting source code into the terminal and compiling
cat > nc.c
^D
cc -o nc nc.c
Used that to
cd /
tar cf - | nc ... ...
HP was nice and left behind source code for the really interesting stuff, i.e. the sources for the userlevel programs and kernel drivers of the nonstandard, proprietary devices that make this thing a measurement instrument. This seemed to be completely unintentional, but this is what you get if your build system can not do out-of-tree builds and the developer just slaps the build directory into a installation tarball. I mean: Who except for the maintenance guy, who's updating the box is going to be able to access that directory? m(
Oh, that covers the source code of several revisions of the software, by which I mean the kernel drivers and the user interface.
Thanks HP! :D
This will of course not compile for Linux. But hey, I don't care. The kernel drivers are easy enough to re-write from scratch over the course of a few weekends. The userland stuff takes much more work though.