Google Glitch Took Thousands of Chromebooks Offline (geekwire.com)

Slashdot reader Bismillah was the first to notice stories about Chromebooks going offline. GeekWire reports: Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of Google Chromebooks, widely prized by schools due to their low cost and ease of configuration, were reported to be offline for several hours on Tuesday. The apparent cause? A seemingly botched WiFi policy update pushed out by Google that caused many Chromebooks to forget their approved network connection, leaving students disconnected.
Google eventually issued a new network policy without the glitch -- but not everyone was satisfied. The Director of Technology at one school district complains Google waited three and a half hours before publicly acknowledging the problem -- adding that "manually joining a WiFi network on 10,000+ Chromebooks is a nightmare."

Comments

manually joining a WiFi network on 10,000+

[pecosdave]

manually joining a WiFi network on 10,000+ Chromebooks is a nightmare

Yep.

Bet you're happy they've quit putting Ethernet ports on everything huh? You know, with an Ethernet port, even if they almost never used them, you could dust it off, plug in a cable later and get the update that would fix your WiFi issue. If only you had the port.

I stay mad at Macbooks over the lack of Ethernet jacks these days, Chromebooks are a mixed lot, but one thing I do know, Samsung put out some really thin systems with a fold-down Ethernet port so there's no excuse not to have and and having one is much more reasonable than expecting everyone to keep up with a dongle.

Re:manually joining a WiFi network on 10,000+

[pecosdave]

An Ethernet port is nowhere NEAR RS-232, PS/2, Parallel port territory. I'm personally considering turning off the WiFi in my own home and just going straight wire on everything, the phones are the only reason I don't. Ethernet is still in heavy use throughout the world and I still encourage my users to plug their damned cable in when they're at their desk, especially if they want me to remote in and fix something.

Re:There's no cloud...

[r1348]

Quite true, considering that Chromebooks are aimed at users using other people's computers (students using school's computers, employees using company's computers, etc.), I'd say they pretty much cover the role.

You get what you paid for

[DogDude]

You get a cheap gadget created a a giant corporation used for collecting and re-selling information about the "users" and expect to use that as a PC. What'd you expect?

Re:You get what you paid for

[Bing Tsher E]

In Education, they got a cheap gadget that pupils can use for their schoolwork. It should be possible for School Districts to host all the 'stuff' that a Chromebook needs on a local wifi based network. The Chromebook apps should all be pushed from the local network and it should be possible for the school district to unplug from the Internet as a whole, or strictly firewall it, to maintain an enclosed learning environment.

Re:You get what you paid for

[ShanghaiBill]

... and expect to use that as a PC.

Schools do NOT expect to use Chromebooks as PCs. They use them as thin clients, running everything in a browser. The kids can't mess them up, because, well, there is nothing on them.

The schools know what they want, and Chromebooks deliver it. Nobody is being deceived.

Re:You get what you paid for

[thegarbz]

Interesting comment.

a) They aren't cheap.
b) Google doesn't resell user data from people who's accounts are tied to Google Edu for legal reasons
c) "users" are actually users, there's no need for quotes.
d) These aren't PCs, they are specific devices designed to run specific software for specific purposes replacing locked down iPads
e) You don't expect your cloud vendor to knock you offline, especially someone with the size, and presumed professionalism of Google. What you normally expect is better, more stable and more reliable service than what can be provided by a lowest bidder IT service.

The dark side of the cloud you can't control

[zerofoo]

We were impacted by this glitch. We are a small school, so manually connecting 40 or so chromebooks was not a huge deal.

However, this is not the first time we have been impacted by a Google screwup. We've had outages where Google's authentication service failed and no one could login to their chromebooks.

We've since decided that we are walking back Chromebooks for staff members and putting them back on Windows laptops. Between the functional limitations of a chromebook, and the centralized parts we can't control, we've decided that an entirely cloud strategy for students and teachers is too risky.

Admin and teachers will be provisioned on on-prem systems. Students will be cloud provisioned. At least this way when Google's infrastructure shits the bed, the business side of the school can keep going.

Re:The dark side of the cloud you can't control

[Gravis Zero]

We've since decided that we are walking back Chromebooks for staff members and putting them back on Windows laptops. Between the functional limitations of a chromebook, and the centralized parts we can't control, we've decided that an entirely cloud strategy for students and teachers is too risky.

So, out of the frying pan and into the fire?

No School Today!

[Fly Swatter]

..because the vendor pushed out an untested update again. Now we are teaching children to accept being dependent on a single point of tech failure. Good old pen and paper is still better, your brain retains the info better too.

-Time to seed my lawn, get off.

Re:No School Today!

[thegarbz]

Now we are teaching children to accept being dependent on a single point of tech failure.

Haven't we always? Given the way people use their own personal devices I will happily recommend cloud based solutions to a lot of people. That "someone else" who runs "someone else's computer" is much better at it than the general population.

Good old pen and paper is still better, your brain retains the info better too.

At what? The latter part of your sentence seems to imply that they are reading from them, that's about one of the few things that Chrome books don't get used for in my wife's school. Now are pen and paper better at taking automated online tests? Sending emails? Editing documents? Visualizing complex math formulas? Displaying 3D models of the body?

Sounds quite like you're making a lot of very critical assumptions to bolster your argument.

No, not quite that "simple" a problem

[Pollux]

No school today...because the vendor pushed out an untested update again.

Let me help you, as it appears you didn't do 30 seconds of Googling to help yourself. Chrome OS is heavily beta tested, and is built upon Chromium OS, which it itself is heavily beta tested. As a Google admin for a public K-12 school (~1200 Chromebooks), I have the option of assigning all my Chrome devices into one of three categories of development. Google "recommends" I activate a policy that will randomly assign 5% of all devices to a beta channel* to assist them with testing and development, though our district chooses to use stable-only software.

Occasionally, a serious bug actually does make it through to a stable, but if it is found, Google has been incredibly quick to prioritize its fix and release an update. It's only when there's a doozie like this where suddenly everyone starts the finger-shaming.

* The first time I turned this on, the very next day, we had about five Chromebooks all come into our office. Every one of them had Chrome crashing randomly, usually within about 30 seconds of it opening up. All had the exact same version of Chrome on it, v.51 I think, when every other one of our Chromebooks had v.50 or below. The only way we were able to fix them was to use a CrOS repair drive utility to reinstall CrOS with a previous version. When I saw that other Chromebooks that had v.50 couldn't be upgraded to v.51, I reasoned that these were the beta tested Chromebooks. I turned that feature back off, but I still saw a few more Chromebooks trickle into my office over the next few days that also "got lucky". After that, never again.