google.colab.auth is unsupported in this environment for custom GCE VM runtime

After deploying a custom GCE VM runtime as per the instructions at https://research.google.com/colaboratory/marketplace.html and connecting, when trying to use the following code

from google.colab import auth
auth.authenticate_user()

I get the following error

NotImplementedError                       Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-1-1f759c1655bd> in <module>()
      1 from google.colab import auth
----> 2 auth.authenticate_user()

/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/google/colab/auth.py in authenticate_user(clear_output)
    144   """
    145   if _os.path.exists('/var/colab/mp'):
--> 146     raise NotImplementedError(__name__ + ' is unsupported in this environment.')
    147   if _check_adc():
    148     return

NotImplementedError: google.colab.auth is unsupported in this environment.

My expectation was that the GCE VM deployed from the marketplace would have the same software environment as the standard runtime but also give me the ability to specify the compute/memory/gpu resources that are avaialble to my GCP project. As such, I was not expecting to need to make code changes to the notebook for it to work on the marketplace GCE VM.

[flyosity]

@cperry-goog Any updates on this? I launched an A100 instance with Google Colab VM specifically to use my Colab Notebook I was using on the Colab Pro + account I was paying for, but on beefier hardware, but can’t connect to Drive so it’s useless.

[cperry-goog]

This is on our radar, apologies for the friction. We don’t support auth.authenticate_user() today for a few reasons, we’re tracking a fix at b/207007587