I figured out (hopefully correctly) that owner, group and accession rights to files and directories on an smbmount are not changeable, not even by root. Thus you have to specify everything at mount time, e.g.:
sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=jeltsch,credentials=/home/jeltsch/.smbpasswd5 -o uid=backuppc,gid=users,fmask=644,dmask=755 //patolmac217/jeltsch /mnt/jeltsch@patolmac217.hi.helsinki.fi
I copied a bunch of preference files (those files and directories whose name starts with a dot) from my old RedHat home directory into my new Suse install. I had backed up the files being root and so all of them were owner:group root:root. In order to only change those files, that had root:root into jeltsch:users I executed from within my home directory:
sudo chown -R --from=root:root jeltsch:users .*
If you wanted to change all files on the system that belong to one user you could use:
sudo chown -R --from=username newowner /
1. Change the userid in NetInfoManager from another administrative account (ex. 502->1000).
2. Change the file permissions:
sudo find / -xdev -user 502 -print -exec chown 1000 {} \;