Henrik,

thank you! Sometimes it's worth reading the man pages... shame on me ...

Also to Ralph Mitchell, who offered the very same answer.

Cheers, Stephan

...

At the top of this file, defaults are defined:

...

DEFAULT LOAD 3.0 7.0 DISK * 86 92 [... and others ...]

...

Below there are single hosts defined (mostly PROC checking)

That's wrong. DEFAULT settings MUST go last, anything else should be placed above it.

It even says so in the file:

The special DEFAULT section can modify the built-in defaults - this

must

be placed at the end of the file.