Hi, I just wanted to update the situation is currently fixed!!
It took a couple days of troubleshooting, but it ultimately came down to permissions. My suspicion was the code was trying to create or write to a temporary table file called lextab.py
2025-03-18 22:12:42: 0: STDOUT: File "C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.487\python311\Lib\site-packages\pycparser\ply\lex.py", line 1004, in lex
2025-03-18 22:12:42: 0: STDOUT: lexobj.writetab(lextab,outputdir)
2025-03-18 22:12:42: 0: STDOUT: File "C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.487\python311\Lib\site-packages\pycparser\ply\lex.py", line 176, in writetab
2025-03-18 22:12:42: 0: STDOUT: tf = open(filename,"w")
2025-03-18 22:12:42: 0: STDOUT: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
2025-03-18 22:12:42: 0: STDOUT: PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'lextab.py'
I can also confirm custom otls were an issue, but somehow a red herring. We had one outlier machine that was working miraculously. It turns out that one didn’t have an updated houdini.env file pointing to plugins and otls and some other configs. So it was working with a vanilla Houdini, but that’s obviously not compatible with an already working pipeline.
The solution was to force change the permissions on the Houdini program folders. Since the full command was able to render properly from command line on each machine, I suspect for some reason the Deadline jobs were running in some level of permission different than if you were to just log in. Anyway, this seems to fix it. Otls and plugins are working as usual.
