I didn’t do much more work on pulling content out of the archived, two-decade old files than I did the other night or when I wrote the article yesterday. By the time I wrote about it I’d exhausted pretty much everything I could think of that was reasonable to try. Before completely giving up and manually picking apart the files using strings (a Unix tool that streams through a file and prints out any text it finds amongst the binary gibberish) or a hex editor I decided to post a question about it on Server Fault, a site for systems administrators to help eachother figure out tough problems.

The original Drezn used a custom Berkeley DB/GnuDB backend which is described as much as it needs to be in the About text. Out of historical interest, or something, I’ve spent some trying to extract that content and convert it so it can be republished. So this is about how that’s been going. As can be inferred from that introduction, this is at best going to be a multipart article on how I did that.