But why does it comply with RFC when I set it up to obtain a lease from the dhcp service on my CentOS virtual machine? That's what's puzzling me.

FYI, the ISP did not provide me with the router.

This system that I found on Newegg looks like a great buy, I might get one myself when they get it back in stock:

Fujitsu PRIMERGY TX100 S2

For testing purposes I would get a virtualization product and run a Linux distro as a virtual machine, you can use VMware Fusion to run virtual machines on your Mac.

It's the router that's not renewing the WAN connection in the right intervals when it obtains a lease from the ISP (waiting up until the lease expires to renew). I was using CentOS as a dhcp service (not client) to figure out if it was an issue with the router itself or is it something the ISP's dhcp server is doing that's telling my router to wait the entire lease before renewing(When I did this scenario the router only waited until half of the lease time passed before renewing, as it should.)

I find that my router waits until the entire lease time passes before renewing, but when I power up my CentOS VM with a dhcp server running and I connect it to the WAN port on my router, my router will follow RFC guidelines and renew when half of the lease time passes. My question is what is my ISP's dhcp server doing to have my router wait until the lease expires before renewing?

I've been setting up an email server for test purposes. It's running on Centos6. It's using postfix for smtp and dovecot for the mailbox server. I have tried to set up an email account using Thunderbird trying several accounts (root and my normal user account) but I keep getting invalid username/password. I'll post configs if needed.

When I try to connect via telnet I get "Connection closed by foreign host."

Thanks for the advice.

Andrea Benini, how would I go about doing that?

I've been experimenting with running my own web server using CentOS. Here is what I have I have running on it:

mysql server
apache with php enabled

SMF forums software

Besides using strong passwords, installing the latest patches, and having only the ports open that I need, is there anything else that I should be doing security wise?

first run "ifconfig -a" and post your results

Try this:
check to see if you have a configuration file for your interface (with the assumption that eth0 is your interface):
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

create a backup copy of the file to your home folder

edit the original file to look like this:
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes

after you save the changes run:
"ifup eth0"

I hope this helps.

I just decided to check back on this thread, I'm glad to see that it has helped other out. Does anyone know if you can get the Fedora cube effects under VMware which uses its own virtual graphics card?

Thanks it worked Great!. I got the Fedora cube now :).