Figthing with FTP Access (Proftpd) Rumi, May 18, 2008 I came this morning to my office desk, tried to put something into my newly set up blog. God knows, why teh hell did i try to make a small change in my Blog URI settings! Anyway, I tried to create some different URI path with Blog- by Date and Month wise. Which I did and WP generated a .htaccess parameters! Then came the fucking real problem, i opened my WS_FTP browser, and tried to connect my account on my newly set-up virtualmin server. “LOGIN INCORRECT”- I just got tired on seeing this error over and over, but couldn’t find any good reason why is that doing so! Checked Vortualmin “refresh cofiguration” button and came up suddenly this stupid error- Shell /bin/false for FTP users is not included in /etc/shells, which may prevent FTP access Step-1 I googled this for a while and concluded to a forum link- http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-2155.html (Quite helpful). But anyway, it didn’t help me other than replacing my- /etc/shells file looking like this- # /etc/shells: valid login shells /bin/ash /bin/bash /bin/csh /bin/sh /usr/bin/es /usr/bin/ksh /bin/ksh /usr/bin/rc /usr/bin/tcsh /bin/tcsh /usr/bin/zsh /bin/sash /bin/zsh /usr/bin/esh /bin/rbash /bin/dash /bin/false Step-2 Did modify the Proftpd config file with the smallest value- # Set the user and group that the server normally runs at. User root Group root It was previously like User and Group with “nobody” Step-3 Went back to Webmin > system > users & Groups section, noticed users shell as /bin/false, tried to changed the required User shell to /bin/sh All went in vein Step-4 Using Putty, tried to login to the shell- WALLA! There’s the answer I just found!!! The desired account’s password was expired that’s why the shell denied to give any access. This is something which I tried 2 days back to check Virtualmin’s account expiery test! Goddamn it! that worked! Anyway, learned a small lesson on the Proftpd and the /etc/shell file too! Administrations