At work I have a network of six computers running Ubuntu. I have a file server set up on a computer with Ubuntu 10.04. It works just fine on one of my computers but fails on three others and I've yet to test the last. The one that works and one that isn't working have 10.04; the other two that do not work have 9.04.

The file system mounts just fine on all four computers. However the owner of the folder seems random. On one computer it's user 1001, the other two belong to other uses. This seems weird to me because these are not the users who were logged in when I mounted file system. I was root when I set it up.

I've tried to sudo chown the folder but it tells me that permission is denied.

/etc/export give rw option to all the computers.
/etc/fstab also has them mounting with rw
And as I've said it works fine on the one computer, so I don't think it's anything wrong with the server.

I believe all that I need to do is change the owner of the folder, but I'm having problems with that.

Oh, I followed these instructions to set up the file server:
http://www.aboutdebian.com/lan.htm

Try exporting with no_root_squash. This will allow root on *other* systems to modify the NFS export's files. Only do this if you trust root on the other systems.

Otherwise, you'll need to sync up the users IDs and names on all the systems to allow user 1001 (whatever its name is) to access the files.

It seems like that did the trick. I've only tested one of the computers today, but I was able to change the owner. Thank you much.