Description of problem:

When you have a hostgroup with other hostgroups as a member of that group(via hostgroup_member option of a hostgroup definition), if you give it a hostgroup name that doesn't correspond to a valid hostgroup two problems occur:
1) The configuration checker(nagios -v nagios.cfg) reports the error, but does does not account for this in the total errors and returns OK. See below for example.
2) Since the configuration checker in problem 1 passes, nagios start up fine, but only populates the hostgroup with hostgroup_members up to the point of the bad hostgroup, and ignores any valid hostgroup_members that follow.

This seems trivial, but can have some nasty side affects if you depend heavily on hostgroups for monitoring which nagios appears to support.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
I am able to reproduce this in both the lastest version of the EPEL RPM nagios-3.5.1-1.el6.x86_64 and the latest 3.5.1 of vanilla nagios source. I haven't tried nagios 4.

How reproducible:
Always


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create the following config in test.cfg
define host{
        use                     linux-server
        host_name               test1 
        alias                   test1
        address                 127.0.0.2
        }

define host{
        use                     linux-server
        host_name               test2 
        alias                   test2
        address                 127.0.0.3
        }

define hostgroup{
        hostgroup_name  test-group1
        alias           Test Group1
        members         test1
        }

define hostgroup{
        hostgroup_name  test-group2
        alias           Test Group2
        members         test2
        }

define hostgroup{
        hostgroup_name  master-group
        alias           Master Group
        hostgroup_members test-group1, bad-group,  test-group2
        }

2. Add include line in nagios.cfg to include test.cfg

3. run nagios -v nagios.cfg

4. start nagios

Actual results:

In step 3 above I get the following:

nagios -v nagios.cfg | egrep 'Error|No serious problems'
Error: Could not find member group 'bad-group' specified in hostgroup (config file '/home/koch/nagios/test/nagios/prefix/etc/objects/test.cfg', starting on line 27)
Total Errors:   0
Things look okay - No serious problems were detected during the pre-flight check

In step 4 I get a hostgroup with just test-group1's hosts:

from objects.cache(actual):
define hostgroup {
        hostgroup_name  master-group
        alias   Master Group
        members test1
        }

Expected results:

In step3 I thing this should result in the config check failing so nagios won't ever start.

In step4 I would expect to use all the valid hostgroups define(although this would not be an issue if step3 acted correctly).

from objects.cache(desired):
define hostgroup {
        hostgroup_name  master-group
        alias   Master Group
        members test1, test2
        }

Additional info: