Thank you bakunin! I see that I was getting my terminology confused; thank you for the explanation. Yes, I was trying to create a daemon that listens on port 9998. Here is what I did:
I have been trying to open port 9998 on an AIX 5.1 box to no avail. This machine is not connected to the internet and I have only been accessing it locally, so I know it's not a network...