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try netstat -ic while doing a transfer or moving lots of data. The first reported values don't seem to ever change. This is with net-tools-1.50-0 downloaded from updates.redhat.com/.../kernel2.2 (or something like that) on a Linux 2.2.1 kernel.
I was able to replicate this problem in our lab. When using the -c switch to netstat it fails to update the numbers being displayed. If I control-c and then rerun you can see that there was in fact changes. This has been passed on to a developer.
Fixed in net-tools-1.51-3.
Please re-Open, apparently this is still|again broken, tried net-tools-1.60-4 (RH7.3) and net-tools-1.60-12 (RH9). Both times netstat -ic will simply repeat the header line, as below (this is over ssh, so the output alone should be enough to create some traffic) # netstat -ic Kernel Interface table Iface MTU Met RX-OK RX-ERR RX-DRP RX-OVR TX-OK TX-ERR TX-DRP TX-OVR Flg eth0 1500 0485433359 0 0 0565588383 0 0 0 BMRU eth1 1500 0 8345698 0 0 0 2967031 0 0 0 BMRU lo 16436 0 48325 0 0 0 48325 0 0 0 LRU Iface MTU Met RX-OK RX-ERR RX-DRP RX-OVR TX-OK TX-ERR TX-DRP TX-OVR Flg Iface MTU Met RX-OK RX-ERR RX-DRP RX-OVR TX-OK TX-ERR TX-DRP TX-OVR Flg ... Btw, the man page claims that netstat --interface=eth0 should only show eth0, but actually you get an error (ditto --interfaces="eth0", "-i eth0" simply ignores the "eth0" bit): netstat: option `--interfaces' doesn't allow an argument usage: netstat [-veenNcCF] [<Af>] -r netstat {-V|--version|-h|--help} ..