Hotgroups file has disappeared

I’m new to Linux and Nagios. I am running Nagios 3.0 and RHEL. I had defined a couple of hostgroups, added hosts to them etc. and they are working fine howerver whne I tried to demonstrat to someone else the proceedure I could no longer find the hostgroups file anywhere. I went back through the command line histroy to make sure I did not move or delete the hostgroups file. Nagios still sees the host groups that I defined and loads/runs without errors. My understanding is that the hostgroups.cfg file should be in the /nagios/etc/objects/ directory with the other config files and it is not. Any suggestions?

Could be anywhere in any of the files in objects/ (that are loaded) - you’d put your hostgroups in hostgroups.cfg if you want to keep everything nice and tidy in your configuration directories, but you could just as easily decide it would be “tidier” to define a hostgroup for say a certain bunch of switches in the same file you configure the switch host objects. Or you could just as easily say to heck with it all and put the whole lot in one big file.
Assuming you know the name of a hostgroup, grep for it in objects/* - that should find it. If not, look in nagios.cfg and see what you have set for cfg_file= or cfg_dir to see if any other location looks likely for it to be hiding.

HTH

/S