It's defined in RFC 4293 - Management Information Base (MIB) for the Internet Protocol (IP): (page 82)
icmpStatsInErrors: The number of ICMP messages that the entity (host) received but determined as having ICMP-specific errors (bad ICMP checksums, bad length, etc.).
How I found that out?
netstat
will get it's information from the kernel, from /proc/net/snmp
. It just formats it. You can see that in the source code of netstat
.
So I had a look into the related kernel code which writes the /proc file. It's: net/ipv4/proc.c (line: 338) You can see that the constant ICMP_MIB_INERRORS
is used what tells me, that the kernel is implementing the ICMP MIB for SNMP purposes.
I've googled for that MIB and found RFC 4293. On page 82 you'll find the definition for icmpStatsInErrors
what is the value in question.
Open source rules! ;)