looking for ethernet errors, collisions

[RW]

On Sat, 19 May 2007 21:10:25 -0400
"Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier at digitaltorque.ca> wrote:

> On 17/05/07 Ted Mittelstaedt said:
> 
> > Note that error counters are often bogus because so
> > many cards today filter errors out in hardware, long before
> > the OS driver gets them.
> 
> Well, there are plenty there on my sis0 interface (internal). 
> 
> [msoulier at kanga ~]$ netstat -i
> Name    Mtu Network       Address              Ipkts Ierrs    Opkts
> Oerrs Coll
> sis0   1500 <Link#1>      00:0a:e6:4a:56:c2 37989565  3980 36808783
> 5749 6492857 
> sis0   1500 192.168.1     kanga             12380344     -
> 9255757     -
>


What are collisions in this context? 

Traditional ethernet collisions aren't possible on modern hardware,
since there's never more than one output writing to each twisted-pair.

netstat -i on my desktop PC shows collisions on the ppp tun0
interface. I haven't a clue what that means.