On Fri, 30 May 2008, Stephen Hemminger wrote:

On Fri, 30 May 2008 21:09:31 -0400
Bill Fink [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Fri, 30 May 2008, Rick Jones wrote:

quoted

quoted

Saving stats output and running beforeafter on a number of systems is
a royal pain when troubleshooting.

Well, with that ringing endorsement :) I would like to state that 
Yoshihiro Ishijima has fixed some bugs in beforeafter and it will now 
deal with /proc/interrupts output better than before.

ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/tools/

Nothing against beforefter.  It's a very useful tool, especially
given Linux's lack of a method to clear interface counters.  But
it still is very cumbersome to use in the scenario I mentioned,
having to save the stats before and after a test on each of several
systems, and then having to run beforeafter on each of those systems.
Then you need to do this all again for every test run.  It's just
not very efficient.

I don't know why the major objection to adding a small amount of
code to the kernel that would make life a lot easier for hundreds
(or more) of Linux network adminstrators.  And the snapshot/diff
idea would not be complex to maintain and would also address the
issue of some hardware not having a clear hw stats capability.

						-Bill

ifstat from iproute2 tools also keeps state to compute number
of packets since last update as well. Come on, it isn't that
hard.

Thanks for the pointer.  I wasn't aware of ifstat (it's not installed
by default on any of my systems).  I will check out ifstat and see what
it can do.

						-Thanks

						-Bill