Recently I tried ifstat on a freshly updated linux box with a 3.2 kernel, it was reporting nothing (0kb) although the network was heavily used.
A quick one-liner confirmed this and I decided to keep it here for later use:
export IFACE=eth0 ; while(:); do cat /proc/net/dev;sleep 1;done|nawk -W interactive -v iface=${IFACE} 'BEGIN{ cnt = 0 } $1 ~ iface { if (cnt) { print iface ":",(($2 - cnt)/1024),"Kbytes/sec"; } cnt=$2; }'
