I've setup Nagios core on OSX 10.7 server via macports fine. It seems to load fine and the sample config files all copied over to /opt/local/etc/nagios/objects/ fine and are specified correctly in the nagios.cfg file.

I then installed nconf manually and got it running without much fight.

Then I clicked on "Generate Nagios config" in nconf and get 1 warning and 4 errors. When I expand the error box here what I see:

Nagios Core 3.5.0
Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Nagios Core Development Team and Community Contributors
Copyright (c) 1999-2009 Ethan Galstad
Last Modified: 03-15-2013
License: GPL

Website: http://www.nagios.org
Reading configuration data...
Read main config file okay...
Read object config files okay...

Running pre-flight check on configuration data...

Checking services...
Error: There are no services defined!
Checked 0 services.
Checking hosts...
Error: There are no hosts defined!
Checked 0 hosts.
Checking host groups...
Checked 0 host groups.
Checking service groups...
Checked 0 service groups.
Checking contacts...
Error: There are no contacts defined!
Checked 0 contacts.
Checking contact groups...
Checked 0 contact groups.
Checking service escalations...
Checked 0 service escalations.
Checking service dependencies...
Checked 0 service dependencies.
Checking host escalations...
Checked 0 host escalations.
Checking host dependencies...
Checked 0 host dependencies.
Checking commands...
Checked 0 commands.
Checking time periods...
Checked 0 time periods.
Checking for circular paths between hosts...
Checking for circular host and service dependencies...
Checking global event handlers...
Checking obsessive compulsive processor commands...
Checking misc settings...
Warning: Nothing specified for illegal_macro_output_chars variable!

Total Warnings: 1
Total Errors: 3

I've tried several different things (played with cache settings, changed file permissions/ownership, edited some config files manually, etc.) but nothing gets me past this step. The thing is, when I run 'sudo nagios -v /opt/local/etc/nagios/nagios.cfg' the output shows it is reading a number of services, a localhost, and a contact in the .cfg files...so I'm pretty confident those are ok and the problem is nconf isnt reading the correct .cfg files or something like that.

Any ideas what to double check? I did lots of googling and found nothing on this specific issue--so either I'm special (I'm not) or am overlooking something really simple.

The path to nagios binary is listed as /opt/local/bin/nagios, if that matters. Also, all the nagios files are owned by nagios:nagios, wheras nconf files are owned by user, with only the directories/files specified in the nconf docs belonging to the _www user and/or group (things like output, temp, config, etc.).

Thanks.