I use git everywhere i can to manage versions, but I have a usecase that is probably very common, but i could not see in the howto lists.

I have a shared fileserver(FS) that is managed by others and is full of the equivalent of binary blobs (media, word docs etc). Binary blobs of course are something that git cannot normally do anything meaningful with. That is diff/patch for managing the evolution of any given file. Binary blobs have a different lifecycle of course, and i see annex as the solution for managing that.

The remote FS is being used as an SMB server to windows and linux clients. The FS has other capabilities that i can use other than SMB mount including rsync and ssh. As it is running samba it also uses symlinks underneath the the SMB to manage shared folders, which can be seen when mounted in unix mode. This means the FS landscape is different when using samba as compared to rsync and ssh, as some paths may be symlinked in. The symlinks should not effect this use case, but I mention them because I don't know how annex would manage this.

The basic scenario is that i have a set of project files and folders in tree on the remote FS. I want to use git to pull these binary files from the FS to edit locally while also seein/capturing changes made to files in that tree by other people not using git. Then i want to push my edits back, without effecting the files that i have no responsibility for (but have write access to). 

Think a team of people with various technical capabilities working on changing binary blobs in this remote directory tree. I want to manage my interactions with portions of that remote FS tree via git (annex) with a local mirror (preferably actually containing only the files i care about) so that i can manipulate them locally, clone to other work machines and generally play about with and then push back while watching the whole tree and capturing changes others make (during sync/merge/push/pull?). Because i do not manage it, or own the contents, i also need to be able to maintain the some of the permissions (guid/uid) of the remote and untouched files. 

Can you give me any suggestions?
