@nemiere: Yaaaay...
Can't be it, the watchdog inherits the same env, LANG is set properly there too.
Plus, lab126 has a ldpreload hack whose sole purpose is making sure the env is always set locale-wise.
Best guess is being headless confuses Python... let's try that:
Code:
env PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-8" ${PYTHON} ${LINKSS_BINDIR}/kfxmeta.py "${last_read_kfx}" "${LINKSS_TMPFS_CACHE}/" &> /mnt/us/linkss/kfxmeta.log