vsftpd on ubuntu saucy - "OOPS: Child died"

Question

I have installed vsftpd with apt-get install vsftpd on my freshly deployed ubuntu saucy amd64 linode.

vsftpd starts but when I connect to it from an ftp client, even from localhost, I get this error: OOPS: child died

syslog and kern.log show this:

Jan 28 14:00:37 gravy kernel: type=1326 audit(1390917637.827:67): auid=4294967295 uid=65534 gid=65534 ses=4294967295 pid=27687 comm="vsftpd" sig=31 syscall=96 compat=0 ip=0x7fff48196968 code=0x0

The default configuration options in /etc/vsftpd.conf are:

listen=YES
anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES
dirmessage_enable=YES
use_localtime=YES
xferlog_enable=YES
connect_from_port_20=YES
secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd/empty
pam_service_name=vsftpd
rsa_cert_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
rsa_private_key_file=/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key

I though it might be something to do with pam or SSL so I commented out those last 3 lines and restarted but still get the same problem.

There is nothing in /var/log/vsftpd.log

Answer 1

There was a bug in vsftpd that affected 64-bit machines, here's the bug report - it looks fixed on Red Hat's distributions but it's not yet fixed on some other distributions.

As a workaround, you may add seccomp_sandbox=NO to its configuration file but that will disable a sandboxing feature (not sure about what it does exactly, but if security is your priority you shouldn't use FTP anyway).

echo "seccomp_sandbox=NO" >> /etc/vsftpd.conf