SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x8d' in file /woldlab/castor/proj/programs/samtools-0.1.16/bin/samtools on line 2, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

This python error can have a lot of reasons to trigger, one of which is a silly one:
If you use python to run a non-python script, or you simply mistakenly added "python" in your code when feeding the server.  : (