Pure-ftpd 530 login authentication failed error on Directadmin

Remote Linux Server Administrator
Server Management Service

Recently, after setting up Directadmin server running CentOS servers which does not allow PureFTPD logins to the server, i got an error such as:

Response: 530 Login authentication failed.

How to get rid of it?

Pure-ftpd 530 login authentication failed error triggers as a result of incorrect ownership of pureftp.passwd file or password database corruption.

Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to fix DirectAdmin related errors.

In this context, we shall look into hos to go about resolving Pure-ftpd 530 error.

More information about Pure-ftp?

Pure-FTPd is a free and lightweight FTP server developed for Unix-like OS including Linux, *BSD, and Solaris. As compared to Pro FTPd server, Pure-FTPd is faster than Pro FTPd server

Moreover, PureFTPd is more secure then ProFTP.

How to fix Directadmin ProFTP errors?

Here, you will see the major reasons why Pure-ftpd 530 error occurs and ways to tackle other errors.

1. Error due to Wrong ownership

Recently, one of our customers contacted us with a problem related to an FTP server. When he tried to log in using FileZilla FTP client and he constantly got the error as below:

Command: PASS *******
Response: 530 Login authentication failed
Error: Critical error
Error: Could not connect to server

On checking, we found that the ownership was incorrectly set for pureftp.passwd file.

So, we tweaked the file permission as follows:

chown root:ftp /etc/pureftp.passwd
service pure-ftpd restart

This fixed the error.

2. Incorrect password

Similarly, another customer had a problem as he could not log in to the FTP server. He was using the right username and password. When he tried to log in to the server, it showed an error like:

Response: 530 Login authentication failed
Error: Critical error

The password of the FTP account in the /etc/pureftp.passwd file was missing.

So, we took a backup pureftp.passwd first before making any changes and edited the pureftp.passwd file

After that, we run the following command to rebuild the pure-ftpd user database:

pure-pw mkdb

This fixed the error.