Ethereal-users: [Ethereal-users] tcpdump question... they have no user mailing list :(

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From: "George P Nychis" <gnychis@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:34:59 -0500 (EST)
Hey guys,

Sorry for a question that is not ethereal, but its related and TCPDUMP doesn't have a user mailing list, only a developer mailing list, so I am hoping someone here could answer this.

After I ran tcpdump for 2 days with heavy traffic, i got:
tcpdump: listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes
102591563 packets captured
210400699 packets received by filter
5217573 packets dropped by kernel

What I am interested in is the "5217573 packets dropped by kernel"  Are these packets outgoing, incoming, or both?  If so, does that mean the application created data, passed it down to the kernel to be put on the link, and the kernel could not handle all the packets and simply dropped them?

Thanks!
George