I think it might be the change of ip adress that is killing your connectivity. I can close the lid of my macbook running os x or linux, let it fall to sleep, go

I think it might be the change of ip adress that is killing your connectivity. I can close the lid of my macbook running os x or linux, let it fall to sleep, go down to the porch outside and let the machine wake up from sleep and still have the ssh connection active. A thing you can do to get more stable ssh connections on your side is to run a nat service on the machine. For example, running connections on a OS X machine that has parallels installed (virtualization software) and that runs NAT is far more stable than a machine without.