Just some comments as I'm going throgh this How-To: 

Sudo is in Ubuntu for a reason and it should be used, so instead of enabling root and setting a root password, run sudo w/ a ' -s ' argument:

sudo -s

That'll put you in as root and you won't have to prefix all of your commands with sudo.

In step #5, instead of restarting the box, you can reload the hostname via /etc/init.d/hostname.sh; faster then restarting the box.

-bdk