(1) Here's where it froze:

Downloading Catalogs and Building Local Data Files.
Starting xml download from Kiwix
Reading Our Catalog
Parsing xml downloads from Kiwix
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/bs4/builder/init.py:545: XMLParsedAsHTMLWarning: It looks like you're parsing an XML document using an HTML parser. If this really is an HTML document (maybe it's XHTML?), you can ignore or filter this warning. If it's XML, you should know that using an XML parser will be more reliable. To parse this document as XML, make sure you have the lxml package installed, and pass the keyword argument features="xml" into the BeautifulSoup constructor.
warnings.warn(

[ It froze here for about ~5 min.]

/usr/bin/iiab-get-kiwix-cat: line 4: 76747 Killed $CMDSRV_SCRIPTS/get_kiwix_catalog -v
Getting the Kiwix Catalog Failed.
Please run iiab-get-kiwix-cat again later.

(2) Running iiab-get-kiwix-cat later worked. With the same ugly XML/HTML warning that's presumably harmless — but might be clarified so this is put in context so that "~5 min of dead air" delays aren't so confusing.

iiab-diagnostics: http://sprunge.us/IiIYRG?en

Possibly related:

• Multi-lingual Characters (e.g. accents) mangled, perhaps due to recent Kiwix catalog changes? #3545
• PR utf-8 decode problem iiab-admin-console#537