A quick anddirty way to make sure the connection runs on startup andrespawns on failure is to add it to /etc/inittab andhave the init process (the, uh, kernel) keep it going.
And that should be all you need to do. Send init the HUP signal ( kill -HUP 1 ) to make it reload the configuration. To turn it off, comment out the line andHUP init again.