For those of you running Ubuntu 12.04, I have created a vsftpd 2.3.5 PPA that backports the allow_writeable_chroot config option from vsftpd 3 to the existing Ubuntu package. To use it:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thefrontiergroup/vsftpd
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vsftpd
ref: http://www.benscobie.com/fixing-500-oops-vsftpd-refusing-to-run-with-writable-root-inside-chroot/1. add allow_writeable_chroot=YES
2. chroot_local_user=YES
