auto update failing on one install

I have a host with a couple of wordpress blogs on it and I am running pureftpd with virtual users to provide logins for the autoupdate feature.

The first worked just fine to update to 2.9, but the second simply returns an error “Installation Failed” with no other information.

The users were added with the following commands:

pure-pw useradd wp-admin -u 80 -g 80 -d /www/blog1
pure-pw useradd wp-user -u 1001 -g 1003 -d /home/user/http/wordpress/

(80 is the www user, owner of the blog1 directory)

pureftp shows the login from wordpress succeeding:

Dec 24 04:24:10 www pure-ftpd: ([email protected]) [INFO] New connection from https://www.name.tld
Dec 24 04:24:10 www pure-ftpd: ([email protected]) [INFO] wp-user is now logged in
Dec 24 04:24:10 www pure-ftpd: ([email protected]) [INFO] Logout.
Dec 24 04:24:10 www pure-ftpd: ([email protected]) [INFO] New connection from https://www.name.tld
Dec 24 04:24:10 www pure-ftpd: ([email protected]) [INFO] wp-user is now logged in
Dec 24 04:24:10 www pure-ftpd: ([email protected]) [INFO] Logout.

I can use ncftp to manually connect to the second user without issue, but wordpress just keeps giving the same error without any detail.