[tor-relays] Question about downtime

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 03:52:27AM -0600, Conrad Rockenhaus wrote:
> Anyway, I had a quick question, on the relay side I run ConradsOVHRelay01 (Relay) and ConradsOVHRelay02 (Exit). They???re running on CentOS, so I have to manually install the latest version of tor to keep up with the security updates. 

Thanks for running two relays!

> I am considering migrating to Ubuntu or Debian to make the update process simpler. To avoid downtime, would it be better to spin up two more boxes and migrate or would bringing them down for maintenance be acceptable? I would like to avoid downtime personally, as they???re stable, fast relays.

I'd say do whichever one you would find more fun.

If you take them down for maintenance and to switch OSes, this is
totally fine, and their reputation will recover after a while -- and
in any case even if they e.g. lose the Guard flag for a bit, they'll be
used for other roles until they get it back.

If you want to do the more complicated approach of spinning up two new
computers, configuring them, and then copying the keys and nicknames
and etc over, so you have less downtime, that is also totally fine.

In sum: do the one that will bring you more joy. :)

Thanks,
--Roger