how do I make a process release its terminal?

[hedrick at topaz.UUCP]

One should perhaps note that after disinheriting your terminal by
using TIOCNOTTY, if you open any terminal, that becomes your
controlling terminal.  This can happen in unexpected ways.  Under 4.3
[more or less] we found that inetd was mysteriously getting connected
to the console.  This caused very odd results.  Like every time
somebody tried to log in via rlogin, they would get disconnected, and
whatever job happened to be logged in on the console would get logged
out.  Anyway, the problem turned out to be that inetd was calling
syslog, syslog was trying to open a network connection to loghost,
this was failing, and so syslog then opened the console.