I was hoping to switch from nfs to cifs on my linux systems to get away from the need to sync uid/gid. I am surprised to find: uid=arg sets the uid that will own all files on the mounted filesystem. It may be specified as either a username or a numeric uid. This parameter is ignored when the target server supports the CIFS Unix extensions. I don't understand why. I thought getting away from this obsolete model (needed to sync + identify users on different systems by uid) was a feature of samba. Is there a workaround? These are all modern linux systems (clients and servers).