I didn't change anything for firewall, ip forwarding or proxy in this or any other zone, though I might have done something inadvertently
I can successfully do wget on pkg.oracle.com, pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release as well as on all sites I tried (eg wikipedia, cnn etc)
---------- Post updated at 04:59 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:50 PM ----------
[resolved]
stopped all services that came up with
svcs \*pkg\* and restarted them, and that appears to have cleared whatever was causing the port issue,
now
pkg search is working as expected
thanks for your help