Comment 4 for bug 9252

sftp (OpenSSH actually) offers the possibility to chown/chgrp/chmod remote files:

sftp> help chgrp
Available commands:
...
chgrp grp path Change group of file 'path' to 'grp'
chmod mode path Change permissions of file 'path' to 'mode'
chown own path Change owner of file 'path' to 'own'
...

on a second thought this is (however) tricky. on an NFS share it works fine in gnome, because local and remote uid's and gid's must be in sync for NFS to work properly. for scp/sftp this requirement is often not met (imagine sftp-ing to your web hosting provider).

I could see a solution for this problem only, if there would be a way to white/blacklist hosts/networks for gnome. the user of the client would have to tell gnome which hosts/networks are in sync (uid wise). or gnome could try to probe if information of a remote host are available via yp/nis or ldap.

the current behavour is "save" for unknown networks, but it's quiet a PITA if nis/ldap is in use.