[tor-relays] tor relay recommended upgrade procedure?

[Zenaan Harkness]

On 3/19/14, Moritz Bartl <moritz at torservers.net> wrote:
> You should add the torproject repository, and then just let it upgrade
> whenever there is a new version. There's no need to reboot or wait,
> having the upgrade process restart the service is fine. Your relay will
> not lose its flags during short downtimes like that.

Thank you, I did that.

The Debian install script evidently gives tor 30 seconds to
disconnect, since it did stop tor after 30 seconds.

Then it went through the normal upgrade process, I kept my existing
config file and voi la - tor was no longer running! This bit does not
seem quite optimal - surely tor ought to have been auto restarted.

Anyway a quick service tor restart started it again and yes, flags intact.

HOWEVER: killing tor in 30 seconds seems to me a little harsh on all
those anonymous connections that were previously going through my exit
relay. Can those clients (if they need) pick up their connections
after about 3 minutes? It appeared that all connections were
completely gone when I finally got tor restarted, which makes sense
but:

Is there are a gentler way such as "don't take new connections, notify
clients we are going down for an upgrade" but allow continuation for
say up to 10 or 30 minutes?

Would that be better or could that be worse eg for privacy,
correlation attacks etc?

Thanks again,
Zenaan