Comment 2 for bug 1342740

Confirming this using Jason Heeris's macfanctld package (made from the 0.6+repack1-1 package used by the OP and available in ppa:detly/mactel-utils), on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

# ( service macfanctld start 2>&1 ) | cat
<< hangs at this point >>
# ( service macfanctld restart 2>&1 ) | cat
 * Restarting Start the macfanctl daemon macfanctld
   ...done.
<< hangs at this point >>

macfanctld is indeed (re)started, and killing it from another terminal allows the command to complete.

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: macfanctld 0.7.detly-2~trusty
Uname: Linux 3.19.0-51-generic x86_64