Questions[alias](server)

I'm trying to set up an alias so when someone accesses /phpmyadmin/, nginx will pull it from /home/phpmyadmin/ rather than from the usual document root. However, everytime I pull up the URL, it gives me a 404 on all items not pulled through fastcgi. fastcgi seems to be working fine, whereas the rest is not. strace is telling me it's trying to pull everything else from the usual document root, yet I can't figure out why. Can anyone provide some insight?

Here is the relevant part of my config:

location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.php)$
{
        include fcgi.conf;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_pass  unix:/tmp/php-cgi.sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /home$fastcgi_script_name;
}

location /phpmyadmin
{
        alias /home/phpmyadmin/;
}

I have some commands in my .profile that I want to invoke from my crontab.

For example, if I have,

alias notify-me="~/bin/notify.pl -u user1"
alias notify-team="~/bin/notify.pl -u user1 user2 user3 user4 ...."

I'd like to just invoke the alias

0 11 * * * notify-team

so if the list in my .profile is updated, I don't have to update the crontab, too. However, I don't seem to be able to use aliases in my crontab. Is there a work around?

I tried the suggestions here to set up the environment (e.g. /bin/bash -lc and the script-wrapper script). It seems like that works for scripts but not aliases.

Any ideas?

Is it possible to enter some sort of CNAME record or alias in the windows hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)?

Basically I want to forward all requests made to host A to host B, without having to hard code the IP address (which changes frequently).

I was wondering if there is a way to use the Alias directive with just one file. Or there was a hack to do this, without having to go into another directory.

What process is necessary to configure a Windows environment to allow me to use DNS CNAME to reference servers?

I want to do this so that I can name my servers something like SRV001, but still have \\file point to that server, so when SRV002 replaces it I don't have to update any of the links people have, just update the DNS CNAME and everyone will get pointed to the new server.