Very true, some implementations of NFS also will squash unknown users (UID 412 on the local server does not exist on the remote server so file created by user id 412 over nfs can be squashed to nobody's UID). this is also the default behavior for root's UID on files created accross NFS. You can disable this with the share/export and the mount options but it opens up some pretty severe security issues... If the OP would be more clear on the actual servers/protocols used we can give better answers. and aye this has nothing to do with perl.

-Waswas