On Sep 27, 2011, at 7:32 PM, Jon Schipp wrote:

> Is this specific to Linux, because I haven't experienced this on FreeBSD?

It's specific to the platforms on which libpcap implements it; currently, Linux 
is one such platform, as is Tru64 UNIX, but FreeBSD (and other *BSDs and Mac OS 
X) aren't.

> Is this Ubuntu distro addendum or has this been added by the tcpdump team.

It was added by somebody who sent a patch for it to the tcpdump/libpcap team.  
(The code that implements it is in libpcap; tcpdump just has code that, on all 
platforms, prints the number if it's non-zero.  It's always zero on platforms 
where it's not implemented.)

> Where do the numbers come from for the "dropped by interface",

On Linux, they come from /proc/net/dev - libpcap scans that looking for a 
packet drop count from the interface, and reports how that number differs from 
the last time it read it (either when it started the capture or when it was 
last asked for the statistics in a pcap_stats() call).

> I was just wondering how this differs. Would this be the number reported by
> ifconfig?

I don't know how ifconfig gets the number it reports, so I don't know whether 
that would be what ifconfig reports.-
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