Hi all I am playing around with an experimental setup of a private Tor network and I am using the control protocol to setup custom circuits. Before establishing the custom circuits on the Tor client , I set the following options:

__DisablePredictedCircuits:1 MaxOnionsPending : 1 newcircuitperiod : 999999999 maxcircuitdirtiness : 999999999 CircuitStreamTimeout : 999999999 CircuitIdleTimeout : 999999999

Thereafter, I turn off existing circuits on the client and establish my own circuit using nodes in my private Tor network. Then the client communicates to a server via this circuit. When the client-server communication ends, the circuit closes by itself. Thereafter, in sometime the corresponding OP-OR connections also close. Is there a way to keep the circuit and/or OP-OR connections alive long after the client-server communication has terminated ?

Secondly, I don't see all TLS connections corresponding to the requested circuit in all the relays. Eg. I am using thee hosts -- A, B and C for the private network where, A runs two directory authorities and an OR, while B and C run only ORs. The Tor client of my setup establishes circuit through A, B and C using the above configuration parameters. 'getinfo' reports that the requested circuit has been established but I only see TLS connection betwen A and C..is there a reason why this is the case. Also, in my network, C has no exit policies, while A and B have 'reject *:*' exit policies (just to make sure that all TCP connections exit via C).

Thanks Sambuddho