Connection issues

[murakn]

Great MCP team, I was delighted to find out that the very day I needed this it was released.

However, I am running into some issues:

1. There is no way of finding the notebooks I already have, making me rely on the "connect on another tab"
2. It always opens on the default google account, I had to log off to use my secondary account (which has credits)
3. When I try connecting using the token, it simply says "Disconnected from MCP". Sometimes on a brand new notebook it will give me the connection popup even though no connection is initiated.

As a result, I am having trouble to connect to an existing notebook. I just managed to do it, killing all tabs and models, but it doesn't seem consistent

Maybe it has something to do with the 1 MCP connection limit? it would be nice to have some way to manage the existing connections.
Maybe another auth method would be more straight forward? just connecting my google account to the MCP for example.

The times I could use it, it was very nice, great work!

[cuffjosie]

Thanks for opening this discussion! Sorry you are hitting these pain points. Working internally to improve that experience of needing to disconnect and reconnect in another tab.

Re 1: When you are on the account with the credits and the notebooks you want to use, Ctrl + O or File > Open Notebook in the menu bar should open a way to switch the notebook in the connected tab.

[SebastianGilPinzon]

@murakn on #3 specifically, your "1 MCP connection limit" hunch is basically right. When more than one colab-mcp instance is running (for example a leftover from a previous session), your browser tab points at a dead port and you get "Disconnected," even though the server "works" when tested alone.

I forked the server to fix exactly this. It tracks running instances in a registry and adds --list-running / --kill-stale so you can clear orphaned servers. Run --kill-stale from a normal shell, then reconnect.

https://github.com/SebastianGilPinzon/colab-mcp

(Heads up: this won't fix the notebook-discovery or secondary-account issues. Those are separate; the fork only addresses the connection / "Disconnected" part.)