ok then how do i figure out what the password for my newly created user is?
i just made a user called joe (to test this FTP thing out) and this is what it says:
joe:!!:11887:0:99999:7:::

what the heck does that mean :confused:

The password hasn't been set for that user yet.
Run the command 'passwd joe' to set the password for the user joe.

i can always change the password back right? like if i go root then run 'passwd joe' i can change the password to something else?

Yes, that is correct :)

this kicks soo much butt!!! everything is falling into place!

i got my FTP working, i got my website working, i got my ikonboard working (had to change shebang line to #!/usr/bin/perl5.6.1), my game server has more clients than ever, i'm learning Linux super fast

i just have to thank you people for all your help :)

Probably not necessary but might make life easier for you. Usually it's pretty standard for a perl script to have the first line as #!/usr/bin/perl

So if you don't want to modify every perl script you use and don't want to further break anything by changing the perl install. You could make a simple link to the perl5.6.1 executable.
Just run something like:

ln -s /usr/bin/perl5.6.1 /usr/bin/perl

that's how it's setup actually. i NEED to change that shebang line, as soon as i change it back to /usr/bin/perl it says "Internal Server Error" and the apache log says "script headers ended early", not worded exactly like that but it has that message behind it.

I did that but I don't know how to avoid this ftp users logging in (through telnet, for example).

What I want to do is to have some users that can ONLY access ftp.

I tried to assign shells like /dev/null to the user but it avoided logging both ftp and telnet.

thank you for your help