I figured out the commands on a Vero V. We only need to stop eventlircd and not the helper services…
systemctl stop eventlircd
Then you can get a response to just see if it is receiving at all with…
mode2 -d /dev/lirc0 --driver default
I couldn’t figure out how to get irw working but I did actually manage to make a working conf file with…
irrecord -d /dev/lirc0 --driver default
The file isn’t perfect, and it was a PITA, but I would suppose if someone got as far as recording the direction keys they could probably look at what was recorded and figure out what their remote was actually sending to match it up to a known working conf file.