Some implementations of Berkeley DB allow you to specify byte order on the command line; for instance, on my NetBSD box, the -E switch specifies the endian order to use. If you have a version of db that supports this sort of thing, I'd recommend using the command-line db tool to dump the database files into another format, then try using them from Perl again.

p.s. RedHat 4? Wow, that's an oldie. I hope to god it's heavily patched; I remember dealing with far too many break-ins on that OS.