VSFTPD 500 OOPS: cannot change directory

Question

Error:

Response:   500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/home/visitor
Error:  Critical error: Could not connect to server

The user is visitor, the group is ftpusersonlygroup

grep visitor /etc/passwd

visitor:x:1000:1001::/home/visitor:/sbin/nologin

chown visitor:ftpusersonlygroup /home/visitor
chmod 777 /home/visitor
chmod -R ugo+rwx /home/visitor

Folder permissions /home/visitor

total 12K`

drwxrwxrwx  3 visitor ftpusersonlygroup  69 Oct  3 20:10 .
drwx------. 3 root    root               20 Oct  3 20:04 ..
-rwxrwxrwx  1 visitor visitor            18 Aug  2 16:00 .bash_logout
-rwxrwxrwx  1 visitor visitor           193 Aug  2 16:00 .bash_profile
-rwxrwxrwx  1 visitor visitor           231 Aug  2 16:00 .bashrc
drwxrwxrwx  2 visitor ftpusersonlygroup   6 Oct  3 20:19 www

vsftpd.conf

local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
chroot_local_user=YES
allow_writeable_chroot=YES
pasv_enable=Yes
pasv_min_port=10000
pasv_max_port=10100

SFTP works but FTP doesn't, no firewall as shown by test below 21/tcp open ftp vsftpd 3.0.2

FTP logs

Mon Oct 3 21:41:46 2016 [pid 26091] CONNECT: Client "XX.XXX.XX.XXX" 
Mon Oct 3 21:41:46 2016 [pid 26090] [visitor] OK LOGIN: Client

"XX.XXX.XX.XXX"

groups visitor user is part 0f

visitor : visitor ftpusersonlygroup

SELinux is disabled

getenforce Disabled

Any other ideas?

Answer 1

Set the parent directory to your user's home directory (/home in this case) to 755 permissions rather than 700 - the vsftpd user (visitor in this case) needs to be able to navigate through this directory too.

Answer 2

Here's how I solved this problem in my case:

When I did this:

cd /var/www/vhosts/
usermod -d example.com usernameexample

I got the error:

500 OOPS: can not change directory

Then when I did this:

usermod -d /var/www/vhosts/example.com usernameexample

the problem resolved and I did not get the error anymore.