Running stuff in the background from the command line

["Angel Gabriel" <badmangabriel lycos co uk>]

I have set up a quake server, and all seems to be running well. However, I'm
not going to commit a whole monitor, and keyboard to this base unit with has
nothing on it, except the apps neccessary to run my quake server.

Running the server from the command line is fine.... ./qwsv and it all runs
handy dandy.
Running the server from an SSH session from another machine... same all runs
fine.
But that would mean tying up another machine to maintain the connection.
When I run the command ./qwsv & , in an attempt to get it to run in the
background.... it bombs out on me. crashes after a few seconds. It gets a
job number, then crashes. Starting it again is no help, because the ports it
uses get tied up, only a reboot with solve the problem. How can I get
something like this to run in the background without crashing?