I am running a headless Centos 5 box.

I need shell access to this server over LAN with the ability to run the command and disconnect without waiting for the command to finish. And then check back minutes/hours later.

I am using ssh but whenever I logout, the commands are lost. remote X using XDMCP is very slow and sometimes there is no workable desktop after login greater. Though I dont want to concentrate getting that sorted out unless its the only good way of achieving my objective.

I resort to scheduling the command using cron but I believe there could be other way to have a persistent console

Any pointers?

Try screen. See here for some detail. Basically you can launch a screen session on the remote machine, run your command, then detach the screen session from the terminal. Later you can re-open the screen session and see the progress of your command.

If the command isn't interactive, run it as 'nohup command &', and it'll keep running after you disconnect.

Dave