ntpd hangs under FBSD 8

[Peter Steele]

> We'll likely go with this solution instead of downgrading Python and the related libraries.

In fact I came up with another solution. I realized that since the problem was related to the process signal mask, instead of called ntpd directly, wrap it up in a C app that resets the signal mask to something that works. I have the following code:

	   sigset_t set, oset;
	   sigemptyset(&set);
	   pthread_sigmask(SIG_SETMASK, &set, &oset);
	   system("/usr/sbin/ntpd -g -q");
	   pthread_sigmask(SIG_SETMASK, &oset, NULL);

I wrapped this up into a standalone app and call this from Python instead of calling ntpd directly. This solved the problem--no more hang. Thanks very much to Kostik Belousov for his "wild guess" that this was related to the process signal mask. His guess was dead on.