Symptoms
When accessing the Terminal emulator from within a cPanel account or WHM, you receive the error:
Error: The WebSocket handshake failed at 0:00:00 AM.
Description
Problems with the Policy Kit (polkit) service may cause the required authorizations to time out and prevent opening a Terminal session. If the polkit service is not running, restarting it and the systemd-login service should restore the service to the Terminal emulator.
Workaround
- Access your server using SSH as the root user. You will need to use an external SSH client rather than the Terminal emulator in cPanel or WHM.
-
Verify the status of the polkit service:
systemctl status polkit.service -
If the service is not active, restart it:
systemctl restart polkit.service -
Restart the systemd-login service as well:
systemctl restart systemd-logind
Additional Information
Other reasons for this error message are covered in the following articles:
Terminal WebSocket handshake failed error (via service subdomains)
Terminal returns a websocket error when Imunify360 is running.
