Learning server admin problem

In an effort to learn how to admin a server without an interface like Cpanel, I took an old (200 Mhz) Gateway computer, threw in a hard drive and loaded Redhat8 on it. After install, set up the server on it, allowing the OS to do many of the options for me, until I learn how via command line.

Here's the issue(s) I could use some pointers on, if anyone would care to help.
* Set up and alias (call it bear) through the graphical interface (as I said, I'm learning, so the first setup I'm going for easy as possible). No problem, or so I thought. Locally on the box, it serves the page from /home/bear as expected. From another browser, it serves from /var/www/html/bear. While this is the doc root for the server, why would it use that instead of the (I presume) aliased directory in /home?
Puzzling for this newbie.

*The other issue is default directory permissions. In the graphical interface, there is a section for administering server parameters like indexes and cgi execution and so forth. At the bottom of the section is a checkbox for 'allow htaccess override..'. Assuming this allows for the use of htaccess files for users, I check the box. On restarting httpd, I get a warning that it failed due to a conflict on the line that was written by checking this box. Apparently it writes 'allow override all'.
The question is: does this indeed allow for htaccess usage in general, or is this telling the server that any user can use htaccess to override the default security settings, and this is causing the warning?

Thanks for any replies...

 

 

 

 

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