TMI's order history shows TWO kinds of USB-to-serial cable in circulation:
Sabrent USB 2.0 to serial FTDI chipset -> Micromate has a driver
Benfei USB to RS-232 Prolific PL2303 -> no driver
So both types are in the supply and indistinguishable by eye. A unit handed the
wrong one has no working modem port and nothing about the cable says so. That
moves the PL2303 explanation from "a theory about one odd cable" to a known mix.
Adds the identification note: check chipset with lsusb, not appearance -- FTDI is
VID 0403, Prolific 067b -- and flags that counterfeit FTDI chips are common in
cheap cables, carrying FTDI's VID without behaving like one. An embedded host
with a single driver is far less forgiving than Linux.
Also records honestly that this does NOT fit the 2026-09-22 field outage as
reported: a Prolific cable never enumerates, so it cannot fail gradually, and
that unit was described as working before degrading. Notes the one story where
it would fit -- if the initial success was over the USB PC port or a bench test
before deployment, the modem path would have been broken from deployment onward
and the recollection would be conflating two connection types. Plausible,
unverified, recorded as such. Identifying that unit's cable settles it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ru8Lg9HkkYvX9VWWo65SmL
serversdownandClaude Opus 5
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