Plesk 530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible

Published by John on September 21, 2016 Under Website Hosting

While working on a client’s Microsoft Server 2008 VPS, which is through godaddy, I ran into some issues setting up an FTP account in Plesk.

Everything appeared to be configured properly, but when I tried to connect via the Filezilla FTP Client, I got the following error:

530 User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible

After some digging, the issue was that Godaddy sets the Computer Name of the computer to a hostname similar to the following, which uses the IP address of the server: s123.456.789.111

Of course, Windows does not support hostnames longer than 15 characters and so this causes some things not to work. In this case, the FTP connection would not connect.

By right clicking on ‘Computer’ and selecting Properties, you can open the Advanced System Settings dialog and change the Computer Name to something that is less than 15 characters. After the changes, when you apply the settings, you will be prompted to restart the computer. A restart is necessary to change the Computer Name.

After changing it, I was able to connect and no longer received the inaccessible home directory issue.

Update Server Hostname On Godaddy’s Website

While changing the hostname on the Server itself and restarting the computer will fix the issue, Godaddy resets your hostname back to the invalid hostname when you reboot the server. Like most cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, you can specify the hostname via their control panel.

So, in order for the hostname to stick for more than one reboot, you also need to update the hostname settings on Godaddy’s website.

Login to Godaddy and goto the server management page, where it says Power, Access, Settings. Click on Settings and you should see the below:

godaddy_hostname

Click change next to hostname and change it to something like server.mydomain.com. You will then need to restart the server using the Reboot option under settings.

Note that it took me a couple reboots for this to stick, possibly because I had also been changing it directly on the server and then rebooting the server via RDP. However, after a few reboots, the hostname stuck and I am now able to connect via FTP to the Plesk Server.


1 Comment |

Comments:

  1. Todd McIntosh on Jan 30, 2017

    Hi John,

    Thank you so much for the post. This was my exact scenario with a new GoDaddy VPS this week. Could not solve the problem after many hours of research online. I’d had noticed that changing the domain name on the web server made the ftp work after reboot, but it wouldn’t stick after another reboot. The advice on the GD control panel hostname and the multiple reboots to get it to stick were GOLD!

    Thank you so much, truly a life saver!!

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