Retention.dat and status.dat - need assistance

[jmillan]

Hello, I'm fairly new to Linux Nagios Core. My manager asked to make some changes and to remove a host that is no longer being monitored. I made the updates in the host configuration files. I restarted Nagios and the changes seem to update ok, but my manager told me he is still getting notifications on that old server. I noticed the retention.dat file keeps changing from the old setup to the new setup from time to time. Does anyone know how to make these changes permanent?

Another interesting thing, I added someone else to the contact group that my manager is currently on. That contact group is still on that retired host (Which I renamed). However, only my manager is receiving the e-mail notification and not the other person I added recently.

Please let me know if you have any questions or need anything more from me. Thanks.

[agriffin]

What exactly do you mean when you say "I noticed the retention.dat file keeps changing from the old setup to the new setup from time to time"?

[jmillan]

Well, I mean that when I viewed the retention.dat file, the host I retired along with all its services were no longer there. However, when I looked at the file again, the retired host and its services were listed again.

Basically any changes I make to hosts or individual services in the configuration files doesn't seem to do anything. Another example, I changed the service on one host to send an e-mail notification when the C drive fills up over 90%, but Nagios still sends a notification out when the service was set to 80% (The C drive on this host is 86% full).

[jmillan]

I think I may have found out what is causing the problem. I did a ps -ef|nagios and found there are two nagios processes are running. One is dated for May 26th, and I made the changes to the hosts and services after that date. I will reboot the Linux server tonight to see if it clears out that old process.

[mguthrie]

Yeah, two instances of Nagios will do exactly what you're describing. If you see this behavior in the future you can also fix the issue with:

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/nagios stop
killall -9 nagios
/etc/init.d/nagios start

[jmillan]

I was able to kill the old Nagios process last night. I verified the e-mail notifications have stopped. Thanks so much for the help!

[agriffin]

Glad you got things figured out!