odd packet reports... 1

[yostyid]

hey there,

So I have a windowsXP Home machine that is showing some odd results for sent packets. When I view the connection status, it says huge numbers of packets are being sent, none are being received (in an idle state.)

For instance, right now it is showing an uptime of 10 minutes and 223,338,299,488 packets sent on the interface and 86 received.

Virus scans come up clean and ad aware cleaned out some junk. i have ran ethereal to sniff the packets, but it is only showing around 680 packets for the same 10 min period as above.

Any idea what is going on? Could it be a bad nic driver?

thanks,
justin

 

[pansophic]

More likely it is an improper calculation that is being performed, than it is that you have a real problem. Do you have any other machines on the network that you can use to actually count the network traffic?

The nic driver is likely the culprit, so I would check on the net to see if others are experiencing similar problems, but it doesn't sound like the end of the world to me. If there is a later driver, I'd download it and update yours.


pansophic

 

[bcastner]

pansophic is correct that the issue is the nic driver. It is responsible for reporting the statistics, and a continuing confusion for some driver developers is that they often report packets, or in some cases bits, rather than the bytes that MS specified.

See:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;296669&Product=winxp

 

[yostyid]

I was hoping it was just a confused driver too. The only thing different about the kb is that the sent is so high while the received seems normal. I will see if there are new drivers out there. Thanks.

 

[jpm121]

It's not uncommon - the built-in LAN port on my Intel 850 motherboard reports that I've received 79 trillion packets since rebooting this morning. Even if it was bits that would be several terabytes of data in 6 hours. I only wish my connection was that fast.