Using Sockets for Persistent Connection

[nethnet]

Hi,

 

I'm building a flash environment for a small scale MMO game, and I need to employ the use of sockets so that users can interact with each other in real time (chat, battle, exploring, etc).  I've done quite a bit of Googling, and haven't turned up much useful information.  Maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing?

 

Anyway, I have my own server, running Fedora 9 and Apache 2.0.  I want to create a PHP "socket server" that runs almost as a process on my server, so that users can connect to it and pass data between each other instantly.  I've looked through PHP's manual on the socket functions, and I'm fairly confident that I will be able to work with them just fine as soon as I actually have the socket server working..

 

So my question is, how exactly would I go about starting this process?  I'm messing around on the command line right now and can't seem to get it to work?

 

Thanks,

 

nethnet