Hi Stephanie,

This is an unusual problem. I’m not sure why your script would work on your own machines but not on an AWS cloud server. First to confirm what is happening. Is it correct that you are seeing “Reading habitat patch data...” and then the script hangs, with nothing more reported after that? The next message would be “Reading XX ocean currents images...”, which you do not see, correct? Finally, have you looked around the screen and the Windows taskbar to see if there might be a popup box hiding somewhere with some additional error information, waiting for you to press ok?

I have two initial wild guesses:

1.    There is a Windows Server 2012 security setting that is interfering somehow. Windows Server releases are configured in a super paranoid way by default that can prevent nearly anything from working correctly. It can be a chore just to get a web browser functioning. It would not surprise me if there was something, somewhere that was blocking some part of this because it was “untrusted”, or something like that. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in this hypothesis; if it was happening the script shouldn’t have gotten as far as it did.

2.    There is some configuration difference between the working desktop machine and the non-working AWS machine that you don’t know about or are not remembering. The hang occurs during code that reads rasters with the gdal library and Python numpy package. If you installed numpy or gdal yourself, or they were installed by something else, this could be the configuration difference. I bring this up especially because I know Ben well and he’s always tinkering with the latest libraries and packages. Because gdal is not something that most users ever install themselves, MGET includes a copy of it. MGET’s copy is several years old; building and testing gdal is a large undertaking so I do not update it frequently. If a newer version was installed, there could be a conflict.

Could either of those be it?

Jason