B00k3r_D3w1tt
Just to let everyone know where this ended up - I switched to Debian and everything is working fine. I found out that there was a driver issue with the realtek rtl8189 in the centos 6.5 kernel version (2.6) with regard to power management. So the root cause was the adapter was falling asleep and centos 6.5 couldn't wake it up automatically. I tried numerous things to get it working, disabling power management, changing drivers, but ended up changing distros and everything is working now 🙂