UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

That sounds very strange unless the instrument's using UDP instead of TCP, which doesn't use connections at all... UDP is more like passing instant-messages back and forth. Individual messages fly around between arbitrary destinations without any connection needing to be set up between them, just fire-and-forget.

I have gradually given up hope that you're ever going to tell us what any of these instruments are, but I'm still bound to ask -- what instrument is this? Knowing what it is, I could probably give you much better advice.

It's a spectrometer. For measuring gamma rays. Not really a high production, well known piece of equipment. It's in the development stage and I am trying to set something up to working with it.

As I mentioned though, it requires me to open up another socket connection on a different port for reading. I am not sure how to do this with accept().

Depends what protocol it uses.

Having not seen its manual, I have absolutely no idea.