I am trying to setup an Ubuntu server and have been running into trouble with the automatic LVM naming including a hyphen. IE HomeServer-vg.

I have gotten errors when partitioning in webmin and have seen the volume group written with two hyphens instead of one(HomeServer--vg) but haven't figured out the proper way to deal with it. I finally reinstalled the server from the beginning and followed some instructions to rename the volume group and took out the hyphen. No more errors in webmin, but I have to assume I am missing a normal bit of knowledge that everyone knows about this. I just installed a virtual machine and it created a volume group name with a hyphen also.

So, what am I missing?

When you enter a parameter on the command line containing 2 hyphens, the command interpreter believes it is the next option. E.g. myparm--1: the "1" is considered the next option.

myparm-1 is fine, because the interpreter allows single hyphens in parameters. Command line parsing handles this correctly.

jlinkels

The situation is a bit different, with LVM if a name contains an embedded hyphen, this gets shown as a double hyphen.

As I recall
I set up some Logical Volumes with single embedded hyphens, but the physical volumes and volume groups had no hyphens.

I'm pretty sure that if you use a single hyphen - even though the mount command shows that /dev/mapper/... has got a double hyphenated name, everything works out OK.

Yes, the default volume group name included an embedded hyphen and following the "automatic" setup I wound up with a hyphenated volume group name. Then I kept running into weird errors esp in webmin when I was trying the set up the drives. I eventually removed all partitions and reloaded 14.04 server and then changed the volume group name.

So if I have a single hyphen in a volume group name does that make it not work in webmin? Do I need to work from bash and double the hyphen?

A new related wrinkle I think. I just tried to add one of the formerly used drives(no partitions) to the server and as soon as I created a partition it added the old volume group. how do I clear that dead data?

That zeroes out the first 50 sectors in the first partition on /dev/sdd - make sure you specify the correct disk and partition. It will trash whatever you point it at.

Edit: after doing that, you'll need to run mkfs on that partition to create a filesystem.

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Awesome. that cleared up the ghost volume group info and I got to read about mkfs and dd. I still don't know what is happening with the hyphens, but since I don't have one anymore in my volume group I am calling it done.

Good for you. Finding out what you need to read about can be a real problem. Being prepared to get into manpages will help no end once you do find that out.

How about using an underscore in place of a hyphen?
I can see that some non-LVM commands might have problems with multiple hyphens.

I didn't want a hyphen specifically. It was a default in the automatic LVM setup and I couldn't figure out how to get around it or even if I needed to. I assume there is a convention that I am missing because if it really was a problem I cant imagine it being an automatic default.