So you’re having a problem with the Internet daemon you wrote. You’re convinced the firewall, or some other magic, in your modern Linux distribution is eating your packets.

No.

First, make sure your daemon is actually running and has successfully bound to the address and port in question:

sudo netstat -atnup

If your application is not listed there you have a problem with it binding its server socket. Check the return values from bind().

If you’re still suspecting the firewall, or some other magic, test your theory with netcat. First start a server, with your relevant address and port, remember you need to be root, or have CAP_NET_ADMIN, to use ports <= 4096:

nc -l -u -p 9999

Here we bind to 0.0.0.0:9999. Now, start a client to test if the server can receive any data:

nc -u 127.0.0.1 9999

Type something on the console and press enter to send it to the server. If you receive the data then there’s no magic, execpt from bugs in you application, preventing your appplication from working.