FTP has made uploading and downloading of files easy.

But, It’s a mess when you get an “Error connecting to FTP access denied 530″ error.

Usually, this happens when the FTP authentication fails, or the server firewall blocks user IP.

Today, we will see why this error occurs and how Bobcares’ Engineers fix it.

Why does “FTP access denied 530” happen?

Before discussing the “FTP access denied error 530”, let’s first know about FTP and its importance.

In simple words, FTP is the standard mechanism for transferring files from one host to another. There are many FTP clients like FileZilla, Dreamweaver, CuteFTP, etc to upload the files on to the server.

FTP server is a critical part of any web hosting server.

Have you ever thought why “FTP access denied 530″ error occur?

This error happens primarily due to the following reasons.

1. User permission problems

In some cases “FTP access denied 530″ error happens when the user does not have enough permissions on the ftp server.

For example, in FTP servers like Vsftpd (Very Secure File Transfer Protocol Deamon, there are option to deny access for certain users. If the parameters “userlist_enable & userlist_deny” in file /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf is YES, then the user gets “530 Permission denied“ error.

2. Server authentication failure

Often errors can also occur due to failure in the server authentication.

For instance, CurlFtpFS is a filesystem for accessing FTP hosts. By default, CurlFtpFS authenticate in clear text when connecting to a non-encrypted connection port. If the server refuses non-encrypted authentication, CurlFtpFS will return an “Error connecting to FTP access denied 530” error.

3. Login authentication failure

This happens when typing username and password incorrectly. Therefore, FTP server rejects the username and password and results in “Error connecting to FTP access denied 530” error.

4. IP Block

Similarly, 530 error can be caused when user’s IP is blocked on the server. This can happen when user tried to connect too frequently with wrong user details. For example in cPanel servers, firewalls like CSF block such user attempts by placing a block for the IP. Then, it results in “Error connecting to FTP access denied 530” error.

How we solved “FTP access denied 530” error?

Now, its time to see how our Support Engineers fix the “FTP access denied 530” error.

1. Initially, we check the FTP logs, /var/log/messages to find more details on why “FTP access denied 530” error occurs.This gives us clues like incorrect username, password, IP blocks, etc.

2. Based on the exact errors in the log, the fix differs. We take the necessary steps to fix it. Let’s check the fix for each of them.

3. User permission denial

Fixing involves correcting the user permissions. In vsftpd server, we solve this issue by setting userlist_deny to NO in /etc/vsftpd/user_list. After that, we assign ‘allowed users’ in file /etc/vsftpd/user_list. Then we put the ‘not allowed users’ in  /etc/vsftpd/ftpusers file too.

4. Server authentication failure

Here, we suggest customer to authenticate to FTP server by using encrypted authentication. For this, customer has to enable SSL in the FTP configuration settings.

5. Login authentication failure

To fix this error, we help user to configure the FTP client setting with correct host address, username, and password. Also, we ensure that the username and password are given correctly.

6. IP address block

Obviously, to fix 530 errors due to IP block, we need to unblock IP address on the server. In cPanel servers, we can do this from ConfigServer Security & Firewall. There will be an unblock icon next to the blocked IP address. Simply clicking the icon  unblocks the IP in the firewall.

Or if server uses iptables to block IP address, we unblock it from the command line itself.

Conclusion

To be precise, “Error connecting to FTP access denied 530” occurs for many reasons such as improper authentication, IP block, etc. Today, we saw the top reasons for the 530 error and how our Technical Team fix these errors.