This arcane error message popped up when I was configuring vsftpd with pam_mysql, to create easily managed FTP accounts.
When connecting to the ersatz FTP account with Transit (a Mac FTP client), it said "Error -203: miscellaneous error occurred while trying to login to the host"
A search for that error revealed only a few blogs in Russian, some unanswered forum stubs, and no help whatsoever.
The answer, I found after hours of hair-pulling, was pretty simple. The vsftpd.conf settings declared that a user would be given access to "/folder/$USER", where $USER is the user name of the FTP account.
so, if my user name was "httpwebwitch", the folder I'd be given access to would be "/folder/httpwebwitch/"
but, alas that folder didn't exist. It actually had to be created before I could log in.
That's apparently what "miscellaneous error" means.
I'd assumed that vsftpd would create the folder for me, when a user logged in. But that is not so. If there is a setting in vsftpd that makes that happen, I'd like to find out what it is.
As it happens there were also some issues with switching to PASV mode and timeouts when doing a LIST command, but that's a topic for another post.
I hope this post is helpful to someone besides me. Cheers ~ hww
