Many people I know routinely use GNU Screen but I had never used it because a) I usually work on servers locally or on-site through SSH, b) it’s quite complex to learn and key combinations interfere with other applications.
This time, however, I’m VPN-ing to the servers I’m setting up Zumastor on. There are two steps in the set up which take a lot of time, initializing the logical volume with nulls (optional, but my advice is you accomplish it for improved replication times) and creating the filesystem. If you are over a bad VPN connection (as it was the day before yesterday), you are essentially fucked because every time the VPN disconnects, the interactive command you launchped is aborted and you need to start it over again. Grrr.
So I decided it was about time to get me started with ‘screen’. Oh my. I love it. It comes with every Linux and *BSD distribution and it does its job very well. In case you want to give it a try, read the GNU Screen introduction and beginners tutorial which Kuro5hin (read “corrosion”) published four years ago.
You might want to check out detachtty as an alternative to screen.