ntpd hangs under FBSD 8

[Peter Steele]

>Very wild guess, check the process signal mask of the child for both methods of spawning.

I'm running ntpd through Python. How do I check the process signal mask? I did some quick searches and it seems Python does not support sigprocmask(). 

In my searches I came across this link:

http://bugs.python.org/msg61870

I think you might be right that this is related to the signal mask. In my scenario the select call is hanging indefinitely, just like discussed in this article.