If you don't have root access, try the netstat command. If you're not familiar with the netstat command you may need the help of your network administrator to figure out how to get collisions and output packets to appear. The netstat manual page can be overwhelming. Simply divide the number of collisions by the number of output packets, and ensure it is well below 1%. If it's not, contact your network administrator immediately.

Figure 4-24. This is an example of an ifconfig command run to determine if network collisions are a problem. From both an inbound and outbound perspective, collisions are well below 1%.

It is very unlikely you will ever encounter a dropped packets problem. I have heard about this occurring only once on an Oracle system, but it was the key problem, and I suspect it has happened in other cases. Essentially, what occurs is the network card receives more packets than it can process and queues the packets for processing. However, if the network queue fills, packets are simply dropped. While this can obviously occur during a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, it could also happen on a particularly popular day for an Internet company.