networking 25 computers

I developed, host and maintain the website for my town.
It is a small town in the boonies of Oregon and the City Hall has 14 computers hooked up on one DSL connection. They want to increase that number to 25 over the next few months. My experience with networking is limited to my home network of 4 PC's, and for that I use a netgear dual speed hub.

I have spoken to Verizon and they suggest two DSL lines although no one in City Hall is a heavy user at all, they mostly use the internet connection for email. I think one DSL line will be enough, at least it has been; they have had 14 computers attached to one router, supplied by Unicom - for the last year, but they have been down for a week now, no one knows why, so they want to switch to Verizon and begin again.

My question is, what would be an optimum hardware setup so that:
1- They can all get online when necessary. (use of router, switcher, hub?)
2- They will have good hardware firewall protection
3- Administration is minimal. ( I don't have time to be a sys-admin, nor do I want to, but I am the only one who knows anything about computers they can turn to so I am available for help.)

thanks up front for any help...

Joste

 

What kind of firewall?
Ushally in order to have a good firewall part of the equasion is NAT so with that being said if you have a REAL firewall a router is not needed because the firewall will handle that.

All you need is:
Firewall / Router
Pair of 16 port switches
Or, a 24 and a 16
Or, a pair of 24s