The 'kill' commands send various signals to processes, as defined in signals.h (see https://linux.die.net/man/7/signal). -hup sends SIGHUP to the process(es), short for hangup. This historically was for when a serial connection was dropped, and the process needed to close / take action accordingly. For daemon processes, and more commonly with modern software, the response to SIGHUP is to re-read configuration files and restart the process.
It is likely the case that you are losing the stable flag because Tor drops existing connections in the process of restarting and reloading configuration when it receives SIGHUP. Someone more familiar with Tor internals might be able to confirm what exactly is happening there.
-MrDetonia -------- Original Message -------- On 3 Jul 2018, 04:28, Keifer Bly wrote:
Hello,
So recently I rebooted my relay using the killall tor -hup command (while I was trying to mae some changes to my torrc file). My relays uptime was not changed at all by this, having a current uptime of about 6 days. However, I noticed today at http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/router_detail.php?FP=db1af6477bb276b6ea5e72132...
My relay lost the stable flag (which it had had for the last about two months). I know not to worry about exactly what flags I have all the time, but it raises the question of what eactly the killall -hup command does?
Thanks.