Retain state not working

We are having a problem getting our system to to use it’s retained state information. After beating my head on it for a while, and then waking back up from the concusion, I am turing to the forum for help. Here is what we have:

In nagios.cfg:
retain_state_information=1
state_retention_file=/var/log/nagios/retention.dat
retention_update_interval=0
use_retained_program_state=1

And in /var/log/nagios:
-rw------- 1 nagios nagios 398532 Apr 10 10:22 retention.dat

And in the /var/log/nagios/nagios.log file I find this after a restart:

[1176216470] Auto-save of retention data completed successfully.
[1176218529] Caught SIGTERM, shutting down…
[1176218529] Successfully shutdown… (PID=13143)
[1176218530] Nagios 2.8 starting… (PID=28912)
[1176218530] LOG VERSION: 2.0
[1176218530] Finished daemonizing… (New PID=28913)

From what I can find the nagios.cfg file is acurate for what we want to do, the file is there and is being created, and is even being auto-saved when I to a restart. However, it doesn’t seem to be reading the file when it restarts, so everything is showing up as pending a check but with no state. If it matters we are running on Redhat AS 4 and running Nagios 2.8.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Our problem has been found. We had added retain_status_information to hosts.cfg long ago, but didn’t realize we needed to also add the setting to the services.cfg file. Once we did that it started working like we wanted it to.