I have not successfully gotten Net::SSH::Perl to work consistantly and reliably on a Solaris

FYI, I've got this up and running (very reliably) on a Solaris 8, Ultra 10. I was in the unfortunate position where CPAN.pm wouldnt work (ACL's) so I had to download each dependency and install it manually. You're right about it being a beast, it really was a massive PIA, but after about 4 hours it was working...