Ubuntu 17.04 SAMBA woes

Having upgraded, done fresh installs, of Ubuntu 17.04 I noticed that the SAMBA/cifs client didn't behave as expected. When mounting a volume shared from OS X (Sierra) it would work for a while before the client started DDOS'ing the server to such an extent that no other users could log in.

We then tried to connect to a windows share (windows server edition), but with a basic fstab entry it would throw an error:
mount error(5): Input/output error
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

Apparently the cifs protocol defaults to using v1.0 of the protocol. By adding "vers=2.1" or "vers=3.0" to the mount options it will mount correctly.

V-Ray for Blender under Linux

Behold my fantastic 3D skillz...

The other day I discovered that V-Ray 3 had become available for, the open source 3D software, Blender and thought that would be neat to try out. At work we primarily rely on Autodesk Maya as the primary 3D software.

Since the official install instructions were a bit lacking for linux I thought I should write up how I got it working on Ubuntu Mate 14.10. First of all, unlike OS X and Windows, there's no install file on linux. I suggest reading through the Chaos Group instructions anyway since I'll skip the obvious parts here.

Start by installing V-Ray 3 standalone. Download the latest Blender (I used v2.73a) and the appropriate V-Ray plugin.

Unpack the Blender files wherever you like, I just kept everything on my desktop since this was just a test. You then need to extract the V-Ray plugin to it's own directory. Don't worry this will only be temporary since the next step is to copy all files (including the custom blender binary) into the blender folders you created in the first step.

A drag and drop copy didn't work for me and I ended up using the rsync command in terminal to get it to work properly like this:
rsync -rav ./vray_plugin_directory/ ./blender_program_directory/
Obviously you should change the directory names in this example.

That's it. Now you should be able to fire up Blender by using the new binary file.