Thank you to mhab12 and dotdash for your answers. Appreciated.
I've been running with a hard drive to experiment with pfSense and tried 'rate' but the system didn't seem to stay functional for more than 30 minutes while 3 people were running torrents on the network. There were timeouts on the LAN side resulting in zero traffic passing through.
I rebooted 2 additional times with the same results.
I removed 'rate' and installed both bandwidthd and darkstat. The system is currently not as stressed but it is fully functional. They both provide stats, but none as desirable (to me) as 'rate' – although I would prefer to be able to capture the 'rate' data because it flashes by rather quickly.
Are there any other 'rate'-like packages that provide relatively real time information on LAN utilization but are more stable?
Again, thanks to all for your information.
Steve