Does your app have control over the config? Could you hash/compare/overwrite with correct config at each startup?
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".
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...
but isnt it supported 10 years?
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.