Environment
Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 (OES 11) Linux Support Pack 2
Novell Open Enterprise Server 2015 (OES 2015) Linux
Situation
OES FTP (novell-oes-pure-ftpd) is installed and configured with "remote_server yes".
Users fail to login, and /var/log/messages shows:
pure-ftpd: (?@__1) [21098] [ERROR] AUTH: Failed to open file: /var/opt/novell/pure-ftpd/<username>/count.txt, error: 13
pure-ftpd: (?@__1) [21098] [WARNING] Authentication failed for user [username]
Resolution
Set permissions of 755 on /var/opt/novell/pure-ftpd/.
i.e.: As root, issue the command: chmod 755 /var/opt/novell/pure-ftpd
Cause
This symptom is sometimes caused by inadequate permission on the directory /var/opt/novell/pure-ftpd/. Permissions should be 755. If the root user has the normal default umask of 0022, the directory would have been created that way. However, if root's umask was modified, or if the permissions on that directory where later modified, this failure can occur.
Additional Information
As of January 2016 maintenance for OES 11 SP2 and OES 2015, the novell-oes-pure-ftpd package has been modified to insure that this directory is initially created with the needed permissions, even if root's umask would normally block some of those permissions. This should reduce the chances of running into this issue. However, any user or process which modifies the permissions on this path after creation could still bring about this failure.