Local users in VSFTPD can't have a a false shell (was, VSFTPD problems with all logins anonymous or PAM)

[Mike Bird]

On Friday 06 October 2006 07:55, Gabriel M Dragffy wrote:
> 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 recent Debian-derived systems, as root, you can:

# ln -s /bin/false /sbin/nologin
# echo /sbin/nologin >>/etc/shells

- and then specify /sbin/nologin as the shell for those users.

--Mike Bird