500 OOPS: vsftpd: cannot locate user specified in 'ftp_username':ftp

500 OOPS: vsftpd: cannot locate user specified in 'ftp_username':ftp

的错误消息。我在google上搜了一把后来发现有一封mail非常有用：
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/.../msg02648.html 

其中有一段话提到：

Yep, I did. There is no occurrence of the string "tunable" anywhere in the vsftpd.conf man page ...

However, I've been delving into the source code, and now understand this - the author uses the name of a config file directive *prefixed by* "tunable_" inside the source code as a variable name. So what I needed to do was define "ftp_username" in vsftpd.conf. For some reason the Debian package leaves a little to be desired in this area, and neither asks you how you want this directive set, nor creates an account for use with vsftpd anonymous connections. The default for this directive is the name "ftp", but there has never been an "ftp" account on my Woody system, nor was one created by the vsftpd installation.

作者提到收到一个500 Oops但是其中提到的tunable_ftp_username哪里也找不到。后来他查看源码，发现源码中是使用一个以"tunable_"为前缀的变量，实际上相应在vsftpd.conf中应该是ftp_username这个directive。所以他在vsftpd.conf中加入了ftp_username=xxx（用户）这一行。但是他也抱怨Debian的发行版没有在任何地方标识这样的问题。而且这个ftp_username的缺省用户应该是ftp，但是woody系统缺省安装后并没有这个ftp用户存在，而且vsftpd安装后也没有添加这个用户。

注：我是用ftp_username=nobody的，然后/etc/init.d/vsftpd restart后成功登陆。