@signal7:
I try various things and 'futz with it' as a means of learning. Sometimes it really pays off - maybe not today, but the info will come in handy later at some point. You've got to admit, restoring a backup should have done it and should have been much less painless than a complete reload.
Me, too.
I was relating a similar tale of woe. Same device. Same problem. I, however, DIDN'T have the luxury of futz time. I had 25 people trying to sell motorcycles, that couldn't because the firewall was down.
I think, when the backup was restored in both our cases, it set the com port configuration back to com1. If you can get to the webConfigurator you can add the tweaks to /boot/loader.conf and get the console back.