This sounds like a tall order. I'd be scared. Buying equipment is not going to fix anything. You've got to learn the existing network before you can make educated purchases. From the scope of the network you describe, here are the basic things I think you'll need to learn about.

Learn about routing. Subnets, CIDR, the differenec between a subnet mask and a wildcard, the difference between static routing protocols and dynamic routing protocols. Default routes. Policy based routing. Observe and document the different subnets you see in your network, figure out their purpose. Look at the default gateway of the clients and the servers. Figure out what device that represents. If you have only one subnet, your network is probabbly to flat. I'm guessing you have at least 2 or 3. Make a diagram.

Learn about VLANS. Tagged VLANS (802.1q), Cisco VLAN discovery (if applicable). I prefer Brocade equipment for switching / layer 2. But I digress. What VLANS are in each switch and how do the physical wires correlate? What subnets run on what VLANS? If you have fiber, you have another heap of things to learn about. Learn how to make an ethernet cable.

Learn about firewalls. iptables (if Linux), ASA / PIX if Cisco etc.. Learn the difference between access-lists and statefull firewalls. Learn how to add rules to whatever firewall you use. What networks route where and what firewalls are between the networks?

What are the single points of failure? Learn to deal with those single points of failure. What are the entry points? What software is everything running? What are the link speeds, where does traffic go, aggregate and split up?

Gather all the contract information for your equipment. Make a printed list of numbers for who to call about what. Seek consultation to fill any uncovered gaps.

Look into graphing software with auto discover. PRTG is wonderful and not that expensive.

In my experience, things don't usually break. When they do it's because:

A.) Someone touched something.
B.) The power went out.
C.) Someone touched something they were not supposed to.
D. ) You ran out of capacity (in a hard drive, on a link.)
E.) A server got overwhelmed.

Lastly, make sure everyone does their Windows updates :-)

1.) If it's not broke, don't fix it. Why does this network need "rebuilt?" What's not working?
2.) Make sure you can put it back exactally how you found it before trying anything.
3.) Never, ever, make a change at the end of the day, or on a Friday. Come in early, real early, for big stuff.
4.) Listen to your users. If they say somethings different, it probabbly is. Take everything seriously.

Rumor has it that Star Trek IV was to originally use an Amiga in the transparent aluminum scene, but Commodore would not loan the studio a computer. Apple, however was happy to. As you all know, the Amiga was a superior, less expensive product, just marketed much more poorly. :-)

There were several real, appropriate examples of UNIX in the movie. Things like "ps -ef | grep badprocess" and "kill -9 badprocessid". I caught that as it went by very quickly and was surprised at the accuracy.

One of the displays showed a very Solairs looking version of top and login. I doubt this circa 1983 teminal had Solaris on it however.

I also thought it was cool that the son looked to see what the father was up to by starting a bash shell and running something like /usr/bin/history to see what his last commands were. That whole sequence was pretty accurate. Overall though, I left the movie feeling a bit uninspired. Not that it was bad movie... it was just felt rushed with no real sense of drama.

Price out dedicated bandwith in a big city sometime. There's plenty of competition and the best you can do in a big city is 2-8 dollars a Mb.

$195/Month for 150Mbs is $1.3 a Mb. Assuming that you can get those speeds reliably, and from all accounts you can, that's ridiculous cheap.

At the most populous carrier hotels in NYC (60 Hudson and 111 8th) the cheapest you can get from all 15 or 20 Tier 1 and Tier 2 providers that tangle those places with their fiber is $2 / Mb. And this not having it conveniently delivered to your door step. It's off some switch in a co-located rack in a crowded data center in the city that you pay for transit to.

And since were are talking a data center that shares ports owned by Google, Limelight, Akamai, Level 3, Verizon, you name it, money changing hands and bidding happen on circuits by the hour. There's plenty of competition for the bandwith provider in NYC, and the best they can do is roughly $2.00/Mb.

Verizon is UNDENIABLY underselling their FiOS bandwidth. They own the 2nd biggest Tier 1 network so they can. Another thing you should know is that Verizon put the breaks on new fios rollouts because they were taking huge hits for each new installation.

http://jeremyreimer.com/totalshare5.gif

Dominant? Hardly.

The C64 had almost 50% market share and the Amiga was very even with the Macintosh until the early 90's.
The world was Commodore's oyster. They became misguided in the late 80's and really screwed it up by the early 90's, well after the GUI boat had sailed.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=61425&cid=5772514

This is the slashdot discussion about Mark Zuckerberg's Synapse Media Player in 2003, referencing what I can only imagine he wrote on the project's homepage.

College freshmen are very motivated when it comes to sex.

I work for an ISP. I came up with this.

We have a dial in clapper that activates power to a cheap switch connected to a public facing SSH relay host. So, I call a number. It turns on the switch for 1 hour. I then log into this relay host on some port other than 22 with a pretty strong password. From there, I can ssh to our other servers. It's one point of access for most everything.

My boss is fully briefed on the system. If I leave, unplug the phone line, switch it to another number change the password and watch the logs.

Facebook used to be cool before they started screwing it up. I don't think it's users are stupid. I think they are wising up.

It has everyone, because.. well it has everyone. And once it got everyone, it started to change for the worse. The changes are what people are complaining about.

If there was an alternative with better privacy regulations and less crap, I think lots of people would jump ship. The problem is, most of the value of Facebook comes from the size of it's user base. In order for the alternative to be appealing, my friends have to have it.

Seasoned users are getting sick of Facebook, and the growth rate will eventually peak and decline if it has not already. It's going to take a while, but I think these days mark the beginning of the end for the Mark and the gang. Wait till the movie comes out.

There is some evidence that moderate exercise can boost your immune system.

http://sportsmedicine.about.com/cs/injuryprevention/a/aa011502a.html
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_115503.html

Perfect. All you'll need is one of those phones with a built in projector.

"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."

There's some irony there. What's interesting is back in 1985 Commodore seemed bloody unstoppable. They sold more PCs than anyone before or after. But then Jack Trameil left and they got lazy. After his departure investors saw this big money making machine and milked it dry with little foresight. Their arrogance really was Commodore's epic downfall. Right.. apples and oranges in a way, but lately Apple seems to be opening the doors to the same kind of arrogant path.

Commodore did somewhat the same thing to a much more aggressive degree when they bought MOS technology. It was part of a cost cutting, vertical integration strategy that served them well. They went on to sell eleventy-billion Commodore 64's at bargain basement prices. They got their chips so cheap they used 6502's in the floppy drives and printers, to huge profit margins and the largest market share by quite a bit during their hay-day. The Commodore 64 came to market at ~$600 about the same time an Apple II cost ~$1200.