What does retention.dat file do?

[Shawn L]

Hi,

I have a question regarding retention.dat file. I read the Main Configuration File Options web page about retention. For my understanding, once I stopped Nagios, the info about all hosts and services will be written into retention.dat, and once Nagios is started again, Nagios will read retention.dat for the info. So, I assume after I stopped Nagios, I could modify retention.dat file manually. For example, I stopped nagios first, then I modified the retention.dat and set notifications_enabled to 0 for host_1, then I started Nagios. At this time, I think the notification of the host_1 should be disabled. Am I wrong about this?

Thanks.

[tmcdonald]

This article is a great write-up on the matter:

http://www.semintelligent.com/blog/arti ... attributes

Basically, you can edit the retention.dat file but you need to make sure you also edit the modified_attributes= setting as well. I just tested this on Core 4.1.1 and it worked with the notifications setting just as expected.