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I've been studying Solaris 10 and 11 recently because I'm aiming to acquire a SCSA. It is not surprising that the most popular flavor of commercial Unix is losing ground.
Getting Solaris
One should not have to register/login to download Solaris or packages for Solaris. Get with the times, Sun. Solaris is supposed to be open source. That's means everyone should get easy access, no questions/logins. I'm talking about anonymous ftp, rsync, and bittorrent. What is more important? Solaris's statistics or relevance.
Package Management
It's not completely horrible. It does figure out dependencies. It's essentially just the equivalent of rpm or dpkg though. There is nothing like yum or apt-get on Solaris 10 or 11. This is a problem. Installing and updating software is a chore, especially installing Solaris Companion software, like vim on Solaris 10. The solution to this is easy. Sun needs to integrate the IPS system from OpenSolaris into their commercial versions.
The Shell
Why are Solaris administrators still using plain Bourne shell by default? Sun, be nice to your sysadmins and give them tab completion and command history by default. Bash is plenty mature to be the default shell. I cannot see any serious admin using Bourne, if they don't absolutely have to. Sun should see this too.
This assumes you've already setup the OpenSSH server on the machine.
First, you will need these packages installed in this order:
SUNWgssk SUNWrsgk SUNWnfscr SUNWnfsckr SUNWnfscu SUNWnfssr SUNWnfsskr SUNWnfssu
Now, you must define your exports before nfsd will start. You do this by altering /etc/dfs/dfstab. To share /export/install for instance, where I have the Solaris installer files, I would add this line:
share -F nfs -o ro /export/install
This line gives everyone read-only access to my install files.
Now, nfs can be started and made to start at boot with these commands:
svcadm enable -t nfs/server svcadm enable nfs/server
You can check to see if everything is working with a showmount -e.
This assumes the Reduced Network Support software group was chosen during initial installation.
These packages will need to be installed in this order:
SUNWgssc SUNWgss SUNWsshcu SUNWsshdr SUNWsshdu
After these are installed, you will have to generate host keys for sshd. You do this with the following command:
/lib/svc/method/sshd -c
Now that the keys exist sshd can be started with this command:
svcadm enable -t ssh
And made to start at boot with this command:
svcadm enable ssh