How do I get rid of sockets in FIN_WAIT1 state?

I have a port that is blocked by a process I needed to kill. (a little telnet daemon that crashed). The process was killed successfully but the port is still in a 'FIN_WAIT1' state. It doesn't come out of it, the timeout for that seems to be set to 'a decade'.

The only way I've found to free the port is to reboot the entire machine, which is ofcourse something I do not want to do.

$ netstat -tulnap | grep FIN_WAIT1 
tcp        0  13937 10.0.0.153:4000         10.0.2.46:2572          FIN_WAIT1  -

Does anyone know how I can get this port unblocked without rebooting?

# record what tcp_max_orphans's current value
original_value=$(cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_max_orphans)

#set the tcp_max_orphans to 0 temporarily
echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_max_orphans

# watch /var/log/messages
# it will split out "kernel: TCP: too many of orphaned sockets"
# it won't take long for the connections to be killed

# restore the value of tcp_max_orphans whatever it was before. 
echo $original_value > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_max_orphans

# verify with 
netstat -an|grep FIN_WAIT1

You should be able to set the timeout with /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout.

There really doesn't seem to be any way to clear the socket manually.