I installed Pureftpd and Ispconfig3 on my server. Starting from the point I'll probably uninstall ispconfig3 and make things directly on the server, now I am so stubborn I really want to see where's the problem.

I created a ftp user through ispconfig, named amdpftp. It is related to a server user named web7.

It logs in with username and password, but if i try to ls, it tells me: FTP Error: 550 Cant change directory to /: Permission denied

I thought many things, like: 1. It is a problem of permissions. I went to /var/www/clients/client0/web7 , it was immutable and owned by root. Chattr -i and chown web7:client0 changed permissions, but with no effect. I restored to root:root, and made it immutable again. 2. I make some mistakes in the pureftpd installation: Wrong, it works pretty fine. The pureftpd.log doesn't seem to say anything bad. 3. The pureftpd.log file is only the pureftpd one, I should also check the mysqld functionality, as it is in a mysql database that user, password and working directory are stored.

I enabled logging in the my.cnf, but also in the ispconfig database operation there wasn't anything wrong.

Then I mkdir testftp in /var/www, chown web7:client0, and edited amdpftp user root directory from /var/www/clients/client0/web7 into /var/www/testftp . Guess what? It worked.

So, now I know: 1. The PureFtpd works pretty fine 2. The mysql ispconfig database as well 3. The username and password of the virtual user created by ispconfig into pureftpd work 4. The correlation between username and password and the user web7 and the group client0 does work.

What kind of magic has been cast upon the ispconfig directories [/var/www/clients/*] that block ftpusers to operate?