Does restarting sshd always keep existing sessions alive?

Question

I booted a server and (too late) I discovered that some breaking change had been made to /etc/ssh/sshd.conf. Can I be reasonably sure that restarting sshd keeps existing connections ? (this was on solaris, but question also applies to ubuntu)

Answer 1

You can be (reasonably) sure that your current connection will not break when you restart sshd. If you want to be on the safe side, simply send a SIGHUP to your running instance and it will re-read its configuration file.