active connections when hibernating

[Roger Dingledine]

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.

> >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

--Roger