FAILED ⛔: lfd - or - You need to restart csf successfully before starting lfd

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Symptoms

You are receiving LFD failure notifications from cPanel. When you check the status of LFD via the systemctl command, you find a message like the following:

# systemctl status lfd
● lfd.service - ConfigServer Firewall & Security - lfd
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/lfd.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2021-03-20 22:46:50 JST; 7min ago
  Process: 15680 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/lfd (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
 Main PID: 8098 (code=killed, signal=KILL)

Mar 20 22:46:50 hostname.example.tld systemd[1]: Starting ConfigServer Firewall & Security - lfd...
Mar 20 22:46:50 hostname.example.tld lfd[15680]: Error: You have an unresolved error when starting csf. You need to restart csf successfully before starting lfd (see /etc/csf/csf.error)
Mar 20 22:46:50 hostname.example.tld systemd[1]: lfd.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
Mar 20 22:46:50 hostname.example.tld systemd[1]: Failed to start ConfigServer Firewall & Security - lfd.
Mar 20 22:46:50 hostname.example.tld systemd[1]: Unit lfd.service entered failed state.
Mar 20 22:46:50 hostname.example.tld systemd[1]: lfd.service failed.

Resolution

Reviewing the error log for CSF will tell you why it cannot start:

1. Access your server via SSH as the 'root' user
2. Review the contents of the csf log file for errors:

   /etc/csf/csf.error

3. The csf service may be prevented from restarting by several issues. You will need to address the issue individually to allow the service to restart.
4. Once the issue has been addressed, restart csf and lfd with the following command:

   csf -r

Please keep in mind that Login Failure Deamon (LFD) by ConfigServer Firewall is a third-party application that is not created by, provided by, or supported by cPanel. If you need further assistance, please reach out to the communify forums or ConfigServer directly:

ConfigServer Forums

ConfigServer Technical Support