# [solved] No RX or TX packets showing on eth0

## miriya

I'm having a really weird error.  My eth0 is connecting me to the internet without any difficulty, but ifconfig (and conky) aren't showing any transmission stats.  

This is the output of ifconfig:

```
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500

inet 192.168.2.10  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.2.255

ether b8:88:e3:81:2c:62  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)

RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)

RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0

TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)

TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

device interrupt 16  
```

My ethernet card is an Atheros AR8161 and I'm using the alx driver built as a module.  If I use my wireless card instead, a Centrino N2200, the transmission shows up just fine (wlan0).  To be sure I'm not actually using wireless when testing eth0, I've used modprobe -r to unload iwldvm and iwlwifi.

The output of uname -a:

```
Linux 3.12.13-gentoo #5 SMP PREEMPT Wed Sep 3 22:38:47 EDT 2014 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
```

Please let me know what else I can post that would help in diagnosing this.Last edited by miriya on Fri Mar 20, 2015 11:04 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## skwang

I don't know what your problem is, but at this serverfault.com question, there are a number of other ways to look at your Ethernet transmission statistics.

http://serverfault.com/questions/533513/how-to-get-tx-rx-bytes-without-ifconfig

What do you see when you do things like: "cat /proc/net/dev", or cat the "files" in /sys/class/net/eth0/statistics/?

If all these also show zero, but your Ethernet is actually transmitting data (you can ping IP addresses, you can connect to your favorite URL in a Web browser), then the problem may be with your driver. (This is a shot-in-the-dark assumption based on very little evidence.)

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## miriya

In an attempt to address a potential driver issue, I upgraded my kernel, and in doing so, the eth0 is now showing usage on ifconfig.  I'm not sure what the problem really was, but it's working now!  My current kernel is 3.18.7.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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