When I start vsftpd on my CentOs machine I get this error:

Starting vsftpd for vsftpd: 500 OOPS: unrecognised variable in config file:  anonymous_enable

How can I fix it?

Answer

The option “anonymous_enable” is a valid vsftpd option, but as you can see on the error message, there is an extra white space before the variable definition, I suspect that the line was there, commented, and that when you uncommented it you forgot to remove the white space after the “#”, check your vsftpd.conf file make sure that “anonymous_enable=YES” or “anonymous_enable=NO” stands on a single line without any preceding spaces then start vsftpd:

service vsftpd start