netstat statistics overflow

[puccha]

Binary package hint: net-tools

In netstat's summary "netstat -s" the fields 'InOctets' and 'OutOctets' appear to be a 32 bit signed value. When sending or receiving large amounts of packets the values occasionally wrap around and change sign.

$ netstat -s
...
IpExt:
...
    InOctets: 201874790
    OutOctets: -2029455654
...

The raw data however is correct:

$ cat /proc/net/dev
Inter-| Receive | Transmit
 face |bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast|bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
    lo: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
  eth0:22360647 218274 0 0 0 0 0 5 76188265 129485 0 0 0 0 0 0
  lab0:11152431249 131487214 0 0 0 0 0 6 51840697004 129560924 0 0 0 0 0 0

Versions:
ubuntu 10.04 - x64_86
net-tools 1.60
netstat 1.42 (2001-04-15)

Netstat should use a bigger integer type, at the very least use an unsigned interger type.

[Jiri Popelka (jpopelka)]

Patch from Sami Farin is here
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=404767

See also
http://bugs.debian.org/561161

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Re-confirmed in Precise.

The patch from Debian has been merged to upstream <http://net-tools.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=net-tools/net-tools;a=commitdiff;h=f1f89328cccf92824ab436fa43068603eb43e34d>.

Since the last upstream release was eleven years ago, I don't think it's a good idea to wait for the next one. Maybe Ubuntu and Debian could cherrypick this fix or take a snapshot from trunk?

[Ken Sharp (kennybobs)]

The patch should have made it into Utopic+

[Robie Basak (racb)]

This is reported as fixed in Debian net-tools 1.60-26, which is included in every Ubuntu release since Vivid. This means that it should be fixed in 16.04, 16.10 and the current development release (Zesty).

If this is incorrect, please reopen.