I use 60 or 90 seconds for Await Replies and check Auto-reconnect with a Reopen time of 5 seconds.
Close after write is usually UNchecked because I don’t like dropping connections on purpose — but it might be a good idea for particularly troublesome VPN issues.
Never have checked “Use DRIVERCTL control” on a PDL TCP/IP. Not sure what it does. (Documentation says it will reconnect the connection after a write. I got the idea you could use it to reconnect to a different address or port, assuming you have a proc to update DRIVERCTL.)
If possible, we also have the network admins set their connection / vpn session timeouts for longer than the time we expect to see between messages.