I've fixed this in what seems an inelegant manner, and I'd like to know a proper way to do it.

The situation:
I have a samba share that I mount locally at boot through fstab. The share is writable and if I access the share directly, say with konqueror and smb (smb://hostname/sharename) then I can do anything I want (create, write, delete, edit, files/directories). I have a mount point on my local machine and I (username dtest) was unable to do anything except read files and create directories trying to do them to the local mountpoint except as root. I figured it would be a matter of but I was unable to do that even as root, I kept getting permission denied. When I did it told me the owner was 1000 and the group was root. Dtest was already a member of the root group and I was able to as root but I still couldn't do anything except read and create directories directly via the mountpoint.

Ultimately I solved this by changing the uid of user dtest via kuser and then just chowning my home directory back to dtest. It seems like as root I should be able to change the owner of the directory. I know it's because this is a samba share, but it doesn't make any sense why root couldn't just chown it. Is there another way to change the owner of a directory, or is this set by the machine hosting the samba share?

EDIT: the uid of the owner of the share on the hosting machine is 1000.

samba allows windows networking for unix/linux. windows networking is inelegant. Specific to your issue: it does not support unix permissions. Who gets write access is usually handled by the server, not the filesystem.

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Yes, after much borking, I figured out that it was the share owner's uid from the server that was being transmitted. I was able to bring everything in line by changing the uid of the user on the server and chowning on that side since it's much less complicated with just a few directories and no gui to have to worry about and then restoring my user's setting on the local machine.

I think I need to figure out how to authenticate on the network and how to set up nfs. It seems more linux-like to have a little more setup and then not have to look back.

I've been noticing more interest in nfs for a while now. I use it for system critical things which I can rely on to be in one place. I only use windows networking for mobile devices.

There are a whole host of collaboration tools for gnu/linux too. But if all you are actually interested in is sharing files to authenticated users, you may only need ssh - give everyone an account on the server. From there it gets as big as you need.