reconnect ssh connection?

[David Garamond]

has someone come up with a trick to let disconnected ssh connections be 
recovered without terminating and having to restart rsync (perhaps by 
wrapping ssh or something)?

i have a very large (but pretty stable/unchanging) tree of files that i 
need to sync daily, at night, between two geographically different 
servers. i'm using rsync -avz --force -e ssh SOURCE DEST. the connection 
is pretty slow and quite unreliable and many times the rsync process is 
terminated in the middle because of disconnected tcp connection. 
restarting rsync would begin the process of building the filelist which 
is pretty slow.

-- 
dave