OK - at your unix prompt type "man nohup". That's a good place to start. Basically this tells the process not to respond to the SIGHUP that will be transmitted if your connection dies.
You should probably redirect the output from this to a file as well as to the terminal using "tee" which will send the output to two destinations. That way you won't lose the log files.
Basically, to use nohup you just put nohup in front of the command you are using.