530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible

Question

I have seen this question asked in the forum, but realized not much was explained about the configuration done on IIS 7.5.

I am using IIS 7.5. Have two websites running. One is using the default folder wwwroot. FTP is working here. I set up file permission for domain users, domain admins, IIS_IURS and administrator to full control. FTP Authorization allowed the user both read and write permission.

I the created applied the file permission to my ftproot file as above, but in IIS 7.5 I allowed authorization to this user created both read and write permission to the folder.

However I get the error:

 530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible. Error: Critical error Error: Could not connect to server. 

Its likely I missed something. I am not using FTP Isolation. I used binding and host header in setting these two sites on same IP address.

Answer 1

IIS 7.5 FTP 530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible. Posted on March 21, 2014 by Frank McCourry http://xpertnotes.net/blog/2014/03/21/iis-7-5-ftp-530-user-cannot-log-in-home-directory-inaccessible/

There are a ton of articles out there addressing this issue. I’m not going to repeat them here. What I am going to share is what to do when you’ve followed all of those articles and it still does not seem to work.

Let me review the problem. Since the introduction of IIS 7.0 and now with 7.5, Microsoft has changed ftp authentication and authorization. This can be confusing because there are two critical steps that must be performed to ensure that a user will actually gain the access they need. First you must set the permissions on the folder they will be accessing then authorize the user in IIS under FTP authorization rules.

Here’s the kicker. If you do this in the wrong order, everything will appear correct but you will get an “Error 530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible.”

To correct this problem:

Remove FTP publishing from the site. Restart IIS Verify that the users have proper permissions to the folder you want them to use. Add FTP publishing back to the site. Add the user to the ftp authorization rules. 

This problem does not happen every time and I have yet to understand if there is any pattern to it other than the order that permissions and authorization are set. Even when they are set in the right order, I have seen this break when adding a new user.