[ale] Cannot chown unowned files

[C. Lee Davis]

I've got an odd situation.  Some of my files have changed ownership to
an unknown user & group...

  -rwxr-xr-x   1 122      114         39696 May  2 16:17 ls
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 122      114         54152 May  2 15:54 netstat
  -rwxr-xr-x   1 122      114         62920 May  2 12:39 ps

There is no user 122 or group 114 on my system.  And I can't chown them
back, even as root.

  host bin # chown root ls
  chown: changing ownership of `ls': Operation not permitted

Anybody got any suggestions?
-- 
_____________________________________________________________________
C. Lee Davis * Network Manager           (^)   ASCII Ribbon Campaign
          COGNISA                         X    NO HTML/RTF in e-mail
   lee.davis at cognisa.com                 / \   NO Word docs in e-mail