Setting up rackspace server

First I would like to say: thank you Rackspace, you have given me back the fire spark in life that has been swallowed by the fire hose.  Your superb user experience with instant server setup and live technical chat support has been a very pleasant surprise.  I can get all that for just $0.015/hour ($10.8/month)?

Anyways ... the things I did/learned from setting up my first Rackspace server:

1. Setting up apache for Python. I do want to run some Django apps, so I followed steps 1 and 2 of a previous setup.

2. DNS ... When I set up a domain name inside rackspace, it's going to be an internal lookup. I'll give my registered domain on name.com the general rackspace name. Then rackspace is going to do an internal lookup to find my specific machine that hosts the domain name.

3. History is found in ~/.bash_history


I created a user from root. How come the user only has sh shell but not the better bash shell like root?
Edit: I think there is more to it: useradd -D --shell <shell-to-set>

4. Check the shell with ps or echo $SHELL

5. Check the shell a particular user is running in /etc/passwd, or view it like grep username /etc/passwd

6. So I changed my user's entry in /etc/passwd from /bin/sh to /bin/bash

7. Move /bin/bash to the top of /etc/shells


Now my user has bash, but it doesn't have .bashrc. There is more to it.

8. Copy root's /etc/skel directory. "The /etc/skel directory contains files and directories that are automatically copied over to a new user's home directory when such user is created by the useradd program." ~ source 

It turns out that I do have them copied, but I have to manually copy them again into ~/, which I'll have to create first, but I need sudo powers for my user, see next post.