Thanks to everyone who submitted an answer ( 3 of you)!

The original problem:

When untarring a file on my sun, onto a disk remoted mounted from an SGI,

the ownership of the untarred files was not the user but was the owner as

defined in the tar file. Since this wasn't even a user defined on the system,

the files and directories couldn't even be creatd due to permission problems.

The fix:

On the SGI I needed to set the tunable system paramter "restricted_chown"

to 1, which only lets the superuser change the owner of a file or directory.

By default on the SGI any one can do this.

Thanks,

Garry Klouzal