First, I have read all the posts about ProftpD and they don't solve my problem : for some reason, anonymous logins are rejected after you enter the password - it gives a "530 Login incorrect". How do I fix this?

My target is to have working anonymous access and then to be able to enable/disable it as and when needed.

Thanks.

Could you copy Anonymous section of your proftpd.conf and an example session(when you try to log in as anonymous)?

sure...here it is :

<Anonymous /mnt/windows/Linux/Mandrake9/tree/>
DefaultChdir /mnt/windows/Linux/Mandrake9/tree/
UserDirRoot off
AllowAll
User ftp
Group ftp
AuthAliasOnly off
RequireValidShell off
</Anonymous>

and this is what happens when i try to login :

[carl@carleeto carl]$ ftp localhost
Connected to localhost.localdomain.
220 ProFTPD 1.2.5 Server (Carl's FTP Server) [carleeto.xxx.xxx]
500 AUTH not understood.
500 AUTH not understood.
KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type
Name (localhost:carl): anonymous
331 Password required for anonymous.
Password:
530 Login incorrect.
Login failed.
ftp>

just thought i'd add this too :

/mnt/windows/Linux/Mandrake9/tree/ is a FAT32 partition which is where I'd like anonymous users to be when they log in. The partition has been mounted with "root:root" as the owner and with 777 permissions.

hope this helps.

After a lot of additional poking around on the internet, I found the solution. Apparently, Mandrake 9 users need to install an additional rpm to enable anonymous logins....it worked fine after that. Here is the URL for any future Mandrake 9 users who have trouble :

http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/cooker.../RPMS/proftpd-
anonymous-1.2.5-3mdk.i586.html

Thanks again Mara for offering to help - I was really stuck on this one.

Well that RPM only gives you a different configuration file for the anonymous logins, so it's probably not necessary to use that RPM if you have specified everything properly in your configuration file.

One thing you where missing is the alias anonymous. Without it you can only log in as ftp:
UserAlias anonymous ftp

I cannot get my anonymous to work either (same distro/version). It crashes just after the email/password part.