["Guy Harris" <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Kalke, Catherine said:
> Would you be able to give me some information on how the Ethereal trace
> counts lost packets that are reported in the summary of a trace?

If by "lost packets that are reported in the summary of a trace" you mean
"Dropped packets" as reported by the "Summary" dialog, then it counts them
based on the dropped packet count returned by "pcap_stats()" at the end of
the capture - a number that is *NOT* available in saved captures (the
current libpcap format doesn't have a way to save that).

This is a count of the number of packets received by the machine running
Ethereal but discarded by the underlying packet capture mechanism because
Ethereal didn't read them fast enough to keep the packet capture
mechanism's buffers from filling up; it has nothing to do with any packet
loss on the network.