Well after some careful investigation the "mysterious" box turned out to be 
a couple of RAxx drives in the bottom of the VAX. After plugging it in and 
hearing the reassuring "chug chug whoooooooosh" of the blower starting up I 
turned the top key from "Standby" to Enable and the system went through 
self test. Tried booting it and nothing, then realized the disks had been 
spun down, pushed in the 'run' button on both drives, tried booting again 
and voila' a VAX VMS 5.2 banner prints and the system (somewhat 
laboriously) came back to life after many years dormant. Now to get the 
SA700 array up so that all the drives it expects to see are on-line, and 
then some setup work to fix up the network code.

--Chuck