I just had the frustrating experience of being asked to set up an FTP server
with zero notice and planning. The situation is far from ideal and time is
short, of course, and I'm stuck setting this beast up. It needs to be running
in an hour or so.

I've never really used FTP much -- SSH has met my needs. So I don't have a
large amount of experience here...I'm ok with Linux administration, not so
great with net admin/FTP admin type stuff.

I did a bit of research, settled on vsftpd as my server of choice (to be run
on a Debian testing box/kernel 2.6). I installed it, did some cursory
configuration (changes seemed to be straightforward -- enabled local users,
disabled anonymous access, etc) and tried to log in. I can successfully log
into the server using my maintenance account on the server, but cannot log in
using any of the class accounts that are created with a batch script.

Those accounts are good, though, as I can su into them or log in via SSH,
etc. So they don't appear to be broken. Since I can log in with my own
maintenance account, the server doesn't seem to be broken, either.