Hey, sorry you (and everyone else) ran into this! This will go away in the next version (1.13), because we're removing the requirement for protobufs and support

Hey, sorry you (and everyone else) ran into this! This will go away in the next version (1.13), because we're removing the requirement for protobufs and supporting a pure json transport interface. It turns out to be both faster, easier to setup, and paradoxically more space efficient. See https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1868 https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1868 for more details.