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Tell HN: Google randomly deleting Chromebook configs

34 points by snerual ↗ HN
The Google Admin Console is randomly un-setting configs for managed Chromebooks.

We develop a Chromebook kiosk app for exams used at 50+ universities in Europe. These universities use Chromebooks as cheap "exam laptops", sometimes in rooms of 1k+ students. They use Google Admin to configure all these machines.

Since last week, exams are getting cancelled, because just when the students are about to start their exam, IT notices their config is (partially) wiped again.

The wiping doesn't happen immediately, the config is actually saved correctly. It just gets deleted after a few days.

We reached out to Google Dev support to raise this issue. Google being Google responded that we "should contact the developers of the kiosk app"....that's us.

Thanks Google

(I mostly feel for all these students having studied hard for their exams and showed up in time, just for them to be send home again)

11 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] thread
stronglikedan
Does your app have control over the config? Could you hash/compare/overwrite with correct config at each startup?
snerual
Nope, we don't have write access to the config. It's manually configured by the universities through the admin console. We first through some admin deleted the config by mistake, but then it started happening for multiple universities.
sfmike
but isnt it supported 10 years?
isilofi
Definitions of "supported" vary widely. It can mean anything between "you get some updates" and "we'll fix bugs and even implement new features you ask for".
1letterunixname
It's 10 years (was 8 until recently) of OS updates. Google (and Microsoft and Apple to be fair) rarely listen to users, even megacorps b2b, about new features or UX bugs. Ask me how I know. :)
bbarnett
It's not the poorly thought out dev work that Google does, which is the problem. Lots of firms are like that.

Instead, it's that they have negative tech support. By negative, I mean that their support goes from "making the situation horriy worse" to "nothing".

isilofi
Get a proper OS with a proper SLA on those machines. Or get an OS that you can control. Then you can complain.

Otherwise, good luck getting Google to move in maybe a few years or so...

crazygringo
Why are you posting this here though?

It doesn't seem to be a widespread problem, and how do you know it's not the universities themselves changing the configs automatically with some other software?

I'm sure you can reply to Google support again, and work with the universities to debug this, using their Google support as well. It might not be Google at all.

Just saying that a single support reply indicating that a rep misunderstood your request isn't uncommon. You still have a lot of steps to try to debug and solve this. I don't see how this is a Tell HN.

nikanj
Because this is the only place to actually get any support from Google, instead of just canned responses from a chat bot
crazygringo
But it's not though -- companies like Stripe are well known for replying here, but not Google.

And every educational institution that uses Google Workspace for Education gets high-quality enterprise-level support, which is the channel OP should be going through.

This isn't something involving free consumer accounts.

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