KernelCare Broken Warnings and Looping about Free Symlink Protection on WHM/cPanel servers

On a cPanel server you may see this warning:

You’ll notice the link “Add KernelCare’s Free Symlink Protection” but clicking it bring up either a blank page, or it redirects to the same page and the same message appears, or you’ll get this shiner:

Ensuring that KernelCare is installed …

The free symlink protection patch is being enabled. You will be redirected to SecurityAdvisor when this is complete.KernelCare was installed, but could not enable the free patch set.

Researching and finding the circular cPanel forum replies is a total mess:

The articles cPanel brings out says ignore it (IGNORE A SECURITY WARNING??):

The first post, by @WorkOnIt, is the answer (if it’s installed):

yum remove kernelcare

Then

curl -s https://repo.cloudlinux.com/kernelcare/kernelcare_install.sh | bash
kcarectl --set-patch-type free --update

Trying to follow the post on that forum? cPanel’s forum has the worst session state.

If it worked, you’ll have something like this:

Installed:
kernelcare-2.96-1.el9.x86_64

Complete!
'free' patch type selected
Downloading updates
Patch level 25 applied. Effective kernel version 5.14.0-503.40.1.el9_5
Kernel is safe

Ubuntu?

To start afresh, you can try this:

apt purge kernelcare

Then

curl -s https://repo.cloudlinux.com/kernelcare/kernelcare_install.sh | bash

Then try update twice ignoring the first error and waiting suitable long the second time.

kcarectl --update

When updating, you might get this:

kcarectl --set-patch-type free --update
'free' patch type is unavailable for your kernel

Here is the brute force way to fix it on Ubuntu:

root@server:~# kcarectl --set-patch-type free --update
'free' patch type is unavailable for your kernel
root@server:~# kcarectl --info
No patches applied, but some are available, run 'kcarectl --update'.
root@server:~# kcarectl --update
Downloading updates
Patch level 1 applied. Effective kernel version 5.15.0-138.148
Kernel is safe
root@server:~# kcarectl --set-patch-type free --update
'free' patch type is unavailable for your kernel

Another brute force way:

root@host:~# kcarectl --update
Downloading updates
Requesting trial license for IP a.b.c.d. Please wait...
HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized: https://patches.kernelcare.com/patches/K20250420_17/8a515a459b11a690690d5632d4a7cfcf2b0cbce8/3/kpatch.bin
root@host:~# kcarectl --set-patch-type free --update
'free' patch type is unavailable for your kernel
root@host:~# kcarectl --update
Downloading updates
Unable to access server. Retrying...
Patch level 3 applied. Effective kernel version 5.4.0-214.234
Kernel is safe

Additional Reference (AlmaLinux 8)

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