Service failures and outdated kernels

Symptoms

After updates to the operating system, we have seen that some users face issues in which an outdated kernel can cause certain services on the server to fail. One of the services being the cpsrvd daemon. Thus, causing WHM's Service Status to show all services as down.

One most common symptom of this is the appearance following error when restarting one of the server's services:

Too many levels of symbolic links.

Description 

In an update for CentOS 7.7, an update to systemd changed the way that systemd handles symbolic links. If the server uses a kernel that was installed before this update, this can cause certain services to fail. To test this, attempt to restart a service such as cpsrvd.

You can use the command:

# /scripts/restartsrv_cpsrvd

Here is an example output of a server affected by this issue:

systemd[1]: Can't open PID file /var/run/cpanellogd.pid (yet?) after start: Too many levels of symbolic links

Workaround

To resolve this, we suggest updating your system's kernel to a modern kernel. If your server is running inside of OpenVZ/Virtuozzo, this likely means that your host will need to update the kernel on the host node and reboot to correct this issue.

More information to resolve this can be seen here: Too many levels of symbolic links .