Who is the Owner?

I mount /mnt on my laptop (host bozo). I touch me.mine and then I type ls -l and I find that the file is owned by 4294967294. I would like to know why this number is generated since it doesn't correspond to the obvious. Is there a way to show file ownership is bozo as that is my laptop's hostname? But I guess that won't matter much when I log in as a user instead of being logged in as root (on the laptop)--or would it? While I'm waiting for a book that my unlock the NFS secrets I'll just end this with your truly, Keith.
 
As an aside: the owner is never your laptop's hostname. Hostnames have no rights. It's the account you touch the file as (or it should be). It depends on the implementation whether the numeric id corresponds to the same user on the server and the client.
 
Assuming you are talking about NFS and you attempted to do this as the root user on your laptop. The exports(5) page holds the secret.

In the absence of -maproot and -mapall options, remote accesses by root will result in using a credential of -2:-2.

-2 coerced into an unsigned integer on a 32-bit platform equals 4294967294.
 
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