Weird problem. Getting this message after installing ftpd under Gentoo and trying to ftp in for the first time :
Error loading /etc/ssl/certs/ftpd.pem
For some reason there are SSL certificates involved? I fixed this by taking the script:
cert-dummy.sh
from the source tarball of bsdftpd-ssl. Run it, then copy the resulting file cert-dummy.pem to ftpd.pem and plonk it in the appropriate place. Seems to do the trick.