newb questions: post-cherry-pick status cleanup, shared local repository permissions

hi, i'm new to git, and have a couple questions which are probably very stupid and/or indicate that i've been doing it wrong.

first, a couple words about my setup/workflow: i'm currently sole developer on a project which may at some point get some other coders. the environment is three linux boxes, one for development and two for production, and three accounts, mine, dev, and prod. all homedirs are hosted on the network and are accessible from all three boxen.

i have a "central" (i.e. bare) repository stored in dev's homedir, and regular copies in all three homedirs. the language involved is interpreted, so the code tree is the deployment.

my main workflow is to hack on a branch in my homedir, then merge and push when i have a feature ready. then i go to the dev account and pull, which constitutes dev deployment. once it's thoroughly tested, i do the same in the prod account.

now, the questions: an exception to this workflow occurred a couple months ago, when i made some urgent bugfixes that needed to move to prod before other stuff that was currently being tested in dev. this was done via cherry-picking some specific commits into prod. now, in prod, when i do "git status", it says "# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 8 commits." is there an easy way to get rid of this? last time i tried it on my own, i attempted some sort of push from prod back to dev, wiped out most of the changes since those cherry-picks, and had to recover by restoring my repository from backup.

second, the ownership structure i currently have for the "central" repository feels wrong to me--the whole thing is owned by my personal account, depsite being hosted in dev's account. since i'm the only one who ever pushes into it, this is not currently a problem, but it's caused permissions issues on the rare occasions i've tried to push from other accounts (e.g. prod, above), and will presumably cause many more if anyone else ever starts coding on this project.

advice?