[[!comment format=mdwn username="joey" subject="""comment 1""" date="2019-10-01T14:06:35Z" content=""" Your NFS server must have root squash enabled then. So any propellor properties that try to set the owner will fail (File.ownerGroup). It's entirely reasonable for properties to need to set the owner of a file. Many properties make files owned by a specific user and having them squashed to "nobody" would break their purpose. There's only one property in propellor that currently uses File.isCopyOf, and that property is in fact installing a user's configuration file, which needs to be owned by that user. So changing that property's behavior is out. So your options are, disable the NFS root squash, or avoid using propellor properties that set file ownership. If you wanted to make a variant of isCopyOf that didn't preserve permissions, we could perhaps look at adding that to propellor. """]]