answering my own mail for further investigation .. :)
there seems to be a problem with FTP in Zope 2.3.0 (on Linux Redhat 6.0). I can list the contents of the root dir (however the Zope console shows an error "PROBLEM(100) ZServer unhandled connect event"). If I want to change to certain subdirs I get "550 No such directory", if I try to list their contents the error message is "550 Could not list directory". These subdirs are just regular Folders but one of them contains custom ZClass instances while the other contains DTML Documents/Methods, Images, External Methods, a User DB, a Catalog, a MailHost and a MySQL DB Conn and a LocalFS (already patched) so i guess it _should_ be listable, right? Of course both Folders are listable in the HTML management interface. Other Folders in the root dir are listable too.
I found the problem - it is the UserDB which doesn't seem to support FTP. On the other hand, I log in to the site root as 'manager', a user having the Manager role, defined in the root User folder. The UserDB in the subdir doesn't have a 'manager' user. Isn't authentication supposed to acquire from the parent then?? thanks --Oliver