Okay, so you are getting this error message “could not retrieve directory listing” when you are trying to login to your ftp account. And you don’t know the reason why.

This issue is happening because your server’s FTP connection mode is in active mode. And so you will need to change it to passive mode to fix this.

To do this we must know the passive port range of the server. To acquire that, we need to search look at the ‘PassivePortRange’ mentioned in ‘pure-ftpd.conf’ file.

To do this first CAT on ‘pure-ftpd.conf’ using the given below command,

cat /etc/pure-ftpd.conf

Given below is the default passive port range,

PassivePortRange 49152 65534

Copy the range and add it in your firewall’s (allowed) incoming and outgoing TCP ports.

Save the settings and restart your firewall.

Now check if you are able to login to your FTP account without trouble.