pure-ftpd default config
At least on openSUSE, /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf gets configured with the following settings:
AutoRename yes NoRename yes ProhibitDotFilesWrite yes
While this is probably intended to prevent novice users from accidentally breaking things, in practice it makes updating files incredibly tedious (or impossible in the case of .htaccess, because of the last setting). Please consider setting these flags to "no" by default.
In any case, the following setting would be useful on openSUSE:
PassivePortRange 30000 30100
These are the predefined ports for the pure-ftpd service in SuSEfirewall2 (see /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2.d/services/pure-ftpd).