Are you looking for a solution to the error ‘500 oops vsftpd refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()’? We can help you in fixing it.

Here at Bobcares, we have seen several such vsftpd related errors as a part of our Server Management Services for web hosts and online service providers.

Today, we’ll take a look at the cause of this error to occur and also see how to fix it.

Why does ‘500 oops vsftpd refusing to run with writable root inside chroot()’ error occur

This error mainly occurs when you have newly installed the vsftpd on a Linux server and trying to FTP to it.

Also, after upgrading the vsftpd or vsftpd-ext, you may come across this error message while connecting to FTP.

For instance, the error appears as shown in the below image.

Remedy for this vsftpd refusing error

Now let us see how our Support Engineers resolve this error message to our customers.

The best fix is to create a separate Linux user specifically for FTP only that can’t log in via SSH.

In case, if you wish to remove the SSH access for a test user then you can run the below command.

$ usermod -s /sbin/nologin testuser

However, this will not completely fix the error. So we need to modify the user’s home directory to read-only. Here, we are assuming the username to be testuser and the home directory to be /home/testuser. Then we run the below command.

$ chmod a-w /home/testuser

Finally, restart the vsftpd by running the below command.

$ systemctl restart vsftpd

Alternatively, you can try bypassing the writable check in the vsftpd config file by executing the below command.

$ echo ‘allow_writeable_chroot=YES’ >> /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf && systemctl restart vsftpd

[Need any further assistance in fixing vsftpd errors? – We are here to help you.]

Conclusion

In short, this error occurs while connecting to vsftpd if it is a newly installed vsftpd or if it is upgraded. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers resolve this error message.