I realize this thread is a few years old now, but I am having the same issue, but this statement isn't consistent.
Fel wrote:The Centrify daemon runs as root on each system. Therefore Centrify running as root on a system will not have the jurisdiction to create the home directory on the NFS server.
On CentOS 6.x and 7.x A new user logs in, the NFS home directory is mounted (with autofs) and the users home dir is created on the NFS share automatically. No permissions issue at all. However, on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS I am seeing the issue raised in this thread. Can you explain the different behavior on CentOS vs Ubuntu and how to fix it? All 3 are new installs, with nothing more than SSH, NFS, AUTOFS and Centrify client installed.
It seems that on CentOS is runs as root as expected and based on the way we have our NFS share created it is able to create home directories on the share. On Ubuntu it seems it isn't running with the same permissions (root).