David Melton writes:

>Getting better.  Still says "User dmelton may not use FTP", even though
>/etc/ftpusers
>contains both "dmelton allow" and "* allow".  At least it's running...

Is the login shell for user "dmelton" recorded in /etc/shells?
Ftpd won't let anyone login who doesn't have a shell of which the
full pathname is in /etc/shells.

(as a free additional advise, only change passwd entries via vipw or
chsh/chfn, never via vi /etc/passwd directly.)

>I took a look at a few months of the netbsd-help list archive, and a couple
>of the
>others.  I'll keep looking for useful information.

Have a look at http://www.mclink.it/personal/MG2508/nbsdeng/netbsd.html;
and you might or might not find that the manpages that come with
NetBSD are more covering than those that come with RedHat Linux
(this is my personal experience, although RedHat is better in that
regard than some other Linux systems).  In particular what sets
them apart, is that for many files, there exists an entry in section 5,
so "man shells" or "man rc.conf" will give you info on the /etc/shells
or /etc/rc.conf files; the same applies to most other configuration
files which appear in the base distribution.

--mkb