Re: We have seen some instances of novell file ownership changing from the
     original owner to our Novell ADSM admin user.  Does anybody have any
     idea how this can happen?

We saw this same thing happen on Novell 4.1 when we restored the data to new
hardware
(same node name). Only a very small number of users were affected (less than
20 out of several
hundred). We were alerted to the problem because the Windows'95 long filenames
for some of the
users' directories had reverted to the DOS 8.3 filenames instead. I spent a
couple of days restoring
individual user directory structures one by one to recreate the problem and
there was a perfect
correlation between the order in which directories/files were restored and
whether that user had the
problem. In all cases, if ADSM encountered lower level files on the backup
tape before the directory
itself we had the problem. If the directory was encountered first then there
was no problem.  Since ADSM
doesn't deal directly with long filenames (they are part of the directory
entry) it appeared that ADSM
was having to create a directory without having access to all of the backed up
directory information
(this information was further into the current tape or perhaps on another
tape. When ADSM finally
encountered the backed up directory entry on tape it didn't seem to be
updating the directory information.
I opened a problem with IBM, but to date I haven't seen a solution.  I might
add that in this case I was restoring
to a different path than the way the data was originally backed up. I could
not recreate the problem when
I restored to the original directory path.