Solaris

Not strange at all to me. All your tests show ssh works as expected from and to Solaris machines.
Putty is then likely to blame. Are you sure to use the very latest version ? Any error log on the putty side ?

putty used is the current verison on the official site .
I download fresh copy of putty on each machine which are restarted daily .

So perhaps was the issue either introduced with a recent putty release or is a networking one (firewall, routing, duplicate address, name resolution, whatever).

I always use putty this release all days and nights which is stable and sufficient from my humble point of view
I did an md5 checksum check to make sure the binary is intact the check was successful always
Maybe the problem is as you suggest (firewall, routing, duplicate address, name resolution, whatever).
i give up .

I have just had a similar problem but with Solaris 9.

Unix to Solaris no problem.

Windows clients using SSH to Solaris failing

Performed all the same checks just as other members have suggested in this thread.
Finally our only option was to attempt a re-install of SSH.

Downloaded OpenSSH along with all the requisite supporting packages from Sunfreeware. Installed them, made the required config changes and bingo!

SSH access is now behaving as it should. Happy days!

Thanks for your tip

If you are trying to connect as the root user then you need to amend the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file to permit root logins:

Code:

PermitRootLogin=yes

and then kill -1 the root sshd processe's PID.