Some RedHat advice?

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

I'm working on a project at work that I'm hoping someone can help with.  I'm 
building an FTP server cluster that includes authentication to an active 
directory.  I already built a demo of my setup on my desktop (a Debian 
desktop), but the company has standardized on Red Hat (specifically RHEL3) 
and so I'm building a real setup.

The problem I'm mostly having here is that Red Hat seems to be restricted to 
include only vsftpd for ftp server choices.  I'm using pam_mkhomedir to 
automatically setup home directories for new users (from the Active 
Directory) when they login.  It seems that vsftpd ignores this PAM module.

The authentication works fine, but it is as if that particular module is just 
being skipped when a user logs in.  I know the PAM setup works fine with, for 
example, an SSH login.  Initially, I thought that that this was because the 
active vsftpd process (running as the logged in user) didn't have the 
permissions to create a home directory, but even with /home set to 0777, it 
doesn't work.

Has anyone else run into anything like this?  Is this just something that 
won't work with RedHat's base distro where I'd be better off looking outside 
the distro for something like ProFTPd, which I'm much more familiar with in 
general.  Would it be best to start considering alternative distributions 
sooner rather than later?  Red Hat isn't a good fit for our Linux uses and 
management would love to cut the cost and hassle of up2date anyway, so 
there's little loyalty to it except a lack of desire to change.

Any advice out there?
-N