I bought some cheap Acer c710 chromebooks, used, off of eBay for WISP use. One as a loaner for customers complaining of speed problems, when we suspect their systems may be the culprit.

The other I’m testing as a field laptop for use in the WISP. We keep the management interfaces of our equipment on a separate VLAN (802.1q), and frequently need to access that VLAN in the field. I couldn’t find any information online about whether this is supported in Linux.

Once I got the chromebooks, I put one in developer mode, and found that the 8021q kernel module is already available. That’s good, because it means I can keep running ChromeOS and get VLAN tagging, I don’t have to install a full-blown Linux system.

Using crouton, it’s possible to add a vlan to the ethernet port, and configure it. Once that’s done, the crouton chroot can actually be exited and unmounted and the vlan will continue to function correctly until the device is rebooted.

Now I just need to figure out how to automate the process of setting up the normal vlan(s) I use.