Here's my $.02...

I know NOTHING about AIX, so my discussion will deal with solaris exclusivley.

I have worked in an environment with a couple hundred solaris boxen, and they were all on a localized network where telnet was eventually turned off in favor of ssh. I do not know who installed the initial hodge-podge of ssh servers on this network, but it simplified (to some extent) the job I had to do. Although, using Net::Telnet should fill in the gaps for initial instsalls.

The job you ask? I had to upgrade (read: replace) every ssh installation.

The requirement was simple, figure out if the current ssh install was a solaris package, if so, removing the current iteration would be easy, otherwise it was up to me on a per-machine basis to try and remove it, this may not be a concern for you, other than bugs in old ssh versions, but I digress.

I suggest for all of your sun boxen to create a stream based package (plenty of info out there on creating sun packages check here) move it out to the sun boxes, and perform a pkgadd -d myssh.pkg.

I wrote a combination of perl scripts, and shell scripts to automate this process for a given list of hosts from a text file. Although I have to say, I spent a lot of that time just figuring out the package creation process on sun machines, and how to install them COMPLETELY (that is answering questions in the package install) hands off, it's possible, but a pain in the butt. After that all I had to do was "push a button", wait and see what happened, and fix any errors.

I know I'm making this seem easy, it was anything but. Although if you put a bit of thought into this, given the excellent comments above, you should be able to figure something out. I might be able to find the docs if you're REALLY interested, let me know.

Very funny Scotty... Now PLEASE beam down my PANTS!