How long can a slave be isolated from the master and still re-establish replication?

We recently had some network issues where some of the KDC slaves were 
isolated from the master for a few hours. When the network came back, 
the slaves were no longer attempting to contact the master.

Should a properly configured replication setup be able to automatically 
re-establish replication even after such long network outage? Are there 
configuration options for ipropd-master/ipropd-slave that need to be set 
to take into account long outages?

Thank you, Adam Lewenberg