pg_dump silently fails

I've been wresting with this problem since 8.0.1 and am able to
duplicate it on 6 different installations.  If I compile postgres from
source, everything works fine.  If I install the RHEL 4 ES RPM, pg_dump
silently fails.  I've attached two straces, one from 8.0.3 RPM that
fails, and one from 8.0.1 that I compiled that doesn't fail (I didn't
recompile 8.0.3 from source, but I've experienced this with both 8.0.1
and 8.0.2, so I'm guessing it also works with 8.0.3).

In my previous conversations with Devrim, he pointed out that this looks
like the line that's causing it to fail:

fstat64(1, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666, st_rdev=makedev(1, 3), ...}) = 0
ioctl(1, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0xbff0c6ec) = -1 ENOTTY
(Inappropriate ioctl for device)

I assumed that it was just my machine that had a problem, but since,
I've installed it on 5 other RHEL machines and every single one has had
the same problem.

Thanks,
Brandon