Someone else in the office was directed to extract the data, and was shown the HTTP interface. When that didn't prove to be straightforward, I was consulted as the resident perl guru to explain why LWP wasn't working as expected.
Now that you've made the suggestion, though, it seems like the smarter way to go. Thanks for the suggestion :)
-dpmott
Comment on Re^2: Mysterious LWP status 500 Line too long
No probs - I've not done it to 3Com switches personally, a quick traul of Google showed up some code that might do what you want, although the guy in the thread seemed to have a problem with it, so it might be a starting point only.