While my company primarily supports GNU/Linux (ie the penguin in ThinkPenguin.com) I have to wonder where else you can purchase a product and get a response from support pertaining to OpenBSD? So we actually do GNU/Linux and “free software” which pretty much translates into OpenBSD and FreeBSD, not just free software on top of GNU/Linux. Anyhow so here is what happened for the curious:

So a customer bought one of our USB 4G modems and was using it with one of our routers running libreCMC. After upgrading the router to a newer firmware it “stopped working”. The router didn’t see the modem. They also mentioned something about the modem working fine in OpenBSD. What-do-you-know- that was the problem. Or part of it. After a few messages back and forth I realized they had almost certainly switched the modem into MBIM mode for use with OpenBSD according to our documentation for OpenBSD. The router expects QMI mode. OpenBSD expects MBIM mode. The OpenBSD documentation explains how to switch between the modes. Ie: the customer had run AT+QCFG="usbnet",2 for MBIM mode in-between updating the firmware and trying to use it with the router again. Fix, switch it back: AT+QCFG="usbnet",0 for QMI mode.

Glad they mentioned OpenBSD or I’d have been banging my head against a wall wondering what possibly could have happened.