Hypervisor: OpenVZ
OS: CentOS 7.7
Kernel: 2.6.32-48-pve
Pure-ftpd: pure-ftpd v1.0.47 [privsep]

systemctl status pure-ftpd

Can’t open PID file /var/run/pure-ftpd.pid (yet?) after start: Too many levels of symbolic links
pure-ftpd.service start operation timed out. Terminating.
Failed to start Pure-FTPd FTP server.
Unit pure-ftpd.service entered failed state.
pure-ftpd.service failed.

strace -f systemctl start pure-ftpd

[pid 25382] recvmsg(3, 0x7ffde2450350, MSG_DONTWAIT|MSG_NOSIGNAL|MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)

Fix 1: Edit /usr/lib/systemd/system/pure-ftpd.service to:

[Unit]
Description=Pure-FTPd FTP server
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=/run/pure-ftpd.pid
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/pure-config.pl /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf –pidfile /run/pure-ftpd.pid –daemonize

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start pure-ftpd

Fix 2: Update kernel to 3.x

Reference: too many levels of symbolic links