Had same problem with Perl, turned out that my Linux distribution had some bad characters on the first line of /etc/issue, a dirty quick solution was to delete that first line so I got a hit on a text-string.
Problem is in the SDK (Perl in this case, guess it is the same in Python.
In NaServer.pm:
sub get_platform_info .....
if ($osType eq 'linux') {
if (-e "/etc/SuSE-release") {
chomp($osName = `head -n 1 /etc/SuSE-release`);
} else {
choIn mp($osName = `head -n 1 /etc/issue`);
}
if ($osName =~ m/(.*?) \(.*?\)/) {
$osName = $1;
}
chomp($processor = `uname -p`);
$osInfo = $osName . " " . $processor;
}
As you see, it does a head -n 1 /etc/issue.
Of course, you might have a completly diffrent problem, but it is worth looking into.
You can add set_debug_style("NA_PRINT_DONT_PARSE") (don't know the Python syntax here, but should be similar) to your code and get some verbose debug.