´After spending the whole day tweaking and experimenting with vsftpd I
now have it setup as follows. Anonymous login, read only, with upload
enabled in one directory. I have a list of local users that can login
over SSL, and have read/write access to files in their jails. The
problem is that some of these users I want to be ftp-specific so they
don’t need valid shells. However if any of the users has the
shell /bin/false in the passwd file then when they try to login to the
ftp is says LOGIN INVALID. Please, how can I go about allowing users to
loging but without giving them valid shells?

A lot of experimenting revelaed vsftpd would only let users login that
had a home directory of /home/$user and a shell, either /bin/bash
or /bin/sh specified in /etc/passwd. I’m stumped.

On Friday 06 October 2006 19:53, Gabriel M Dragffy wrote:
> This would seem to be a bit of a small discrepency, why can’t vsftpd
> allow a user to login that has a shell of /bin/false? Pureftpd can, no
> probs, hmm.

Sorry, I should have covered that. You can add /bin/false instead
of /sbin/nologin to the list of shells in /etc/shells. We use
/sbin/nologin for compatibility across our various Redhat, Fedora,
Debian and Ubuntu systems.

–Mike Bird

From a nother Source
Make sure you have

pam_service_name=vsftpd

in your /etc/vsftpd.conf