Comment 3 for bug 677764

Since the release of 10.04, I've been spending a lot of time transitioning a bunch of physical 32-bit boxes to virtual 64-bit servers. A couple of the new boxes were built, blown away and rebuilt for various reasons. The problem is I can't remember which box generated this problem and if it even exists anymore.

Having said that, I have a big cheat sheet with a bunch of "aptitude install" commands to quickly setup the majority of the programs that can be found on all of our servers. These commands are cut-and-pasted manually so we can fine tune each installation but it's still fast because we're able to knock out the majority of packages quickly.

In the /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf file there is a line to set a non privileged user for vsftpd to run under:

#nopriv_user=ftpsecure

The usual steps are load vsftpd, edit vsftpd.conf, uncomment the line above, save the configuration file, create the user "ftpsecure", and then restart vsftpd.

Using the "history" command on one of my boxes shows this process:

root@itdevcode:~# history | grep ftp
   60 aptitude install vsftpd build-essential
   61 vi /etc/vsftpd.conf
   62 adduser ftpsecure --system --no-create-home --disabled-password
   63 restart vsftpd

It may be possible that I thought I had loaded vsftpd and created the "ftpsecure" user. Then I realized the vsftpd.conf was missing and tried to load the software. If the existence of the "ftpsecure" user caused the load to fail, then it would explain why I've loaded a bunch of boxes successfully and had a single one fail with an error. On this one install I could have done a step out of order.