Does the dropped packets output of ifconfig refer to the number of frames lost on the local subnet (i.e. datalink layer) or the number of lost IP datagrams at the IP layer or is it TCP retransmission statistics?
And is this number a reasonable proxy for network issues between two hosts on the Internet?
The ifconfig tool shows the number of dropped frames since the 2.6.37 version of the Linux kernel. It gets the information from the kernel itself, which you can view directly in /proc/net/dev
Things that can increase the count of dropped packets are:
Since it focuses up to the networking level, it's not the only tool you should use to detect networking problems, and there's not a silver bullet for it. It all depends of what you want to troubleshoot...
Hope this helps!
No, ifconfig show packets dropped in your computer for some reason. To many packet in queue or bad checksum. It do not count packet dropped in firewall (iptables) neither packet dropped in network.
