Discovered that the PassivePorts option does not propogate globally to the owned-IP virtualhosts. Added the following to the proftpd.vhosts.conf template: PassivePorts 35000 35999 Note that existing VHs in the /etc/proftpd.vhost.conf will not be affected as there is no "rewrite" functionality for proftpd, like there is with apache. Only newly created user with owned IPs will see this. You can add it to the existing VHs if you need to.