active connections when hibernating

[Scott Bennett]

     On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:52:21 -0400 Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:

>On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 05:05:52PM -0500, Scott Bennett wrote:
>>      Okay.  I don't know what tor is "supposed to" do about existing server
>> connections and circuits when a SIGHUP results in ORPort being closed.
>> However, I can see why the continuing operation of the client side of tor
>> would make it desirable to maintain any currently open connections to its
>> chosen entry guards.
>
>If you disable your ORPort and sighup, Tor will stop listening for
>new connections on the ORPort, and it will send back destroy cells in
>response to any new create cells it receives, and it will refuse any
>new begin cells it receives, but otherwise it will continue to act like
>a server with respect to circuits and streams that are already open.

     Thanks for the reply.  Yes, that is what I had hoped was the case.
>
>> >In the past, I've seen that if the client has no activity, it does not
>> >replace the connections. I have seen an idle tor client wind up with
>> >no open sockets.
>> 
>>      Huh.  Now that you mention it, I've suspected the same thing, though
>> I've never checked it out very closely.  Maybe Roger Dingledine could
>> comment on whether this is actually the intended behavior and why it is or
>> is not.
>
>Correct, that is intended behavior.
>
>See e.g. sec 2.1.1 of
>https://tor.eff.org/svn/trunk/doc/spec/path-spec.txt
>
     Ah.  Thank you.  So there is a one-hour threshhold of idle time for
halting the preemptive circuit creation process.  That can be a little bit
inconvenient the next time you try to access something through the tor
client, but I suppose it does save a chunk of server time and bandwidth.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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