In our installation, we have perl installed as a multi-platform setup:... How hard/bad would it be to set up your network paths like this:

   /net/sparc/tools/perl-5.8.8/{bin,lib,...}
   /net/i386/tools/perl-5.8.8/...
   /net/linux/tools/perl-5.8.8/...

# symbolic link:
   /net/tools -> /etc/tools

# on solaris:
   /etc/tools -> /net/sparc/tools

# on freebsd:
   /etc/tools -> /net/i386/tools

# on linux:
   /etc/tools -> /net/linux/tools
[download]

The idea is that /etc is (presumably) always a local device/volume on any given machine, so you can use a symlink called /etc/tools that points to the appropriate directory tree for a given OS, and still keep all the OS-dependent trees on a common network drive.

You might want to tweak how you structure it -- what directory level is the best one for isolating the OS-dependent binaries. There might be better solutions, but I've seen this one used to reasonably good effect in a multi-OS setup.