Just now I did something obscure. I cost me much of a day and the cost of a book to figure out how to do it. I record it here so that I might do it again more quickly when I rebuild my system. Also this is a record of the cost of administrating computers.

I had put an .htaccess file in one of the directories served by the Apache server that comes with Mac OS 10. It was the same file that works on my commercial cap-lore.com server. It had no effect on the server on my Mac.

The fix was to change “AllowOverride None” to “AllowOverride All” in the file /etc/httpd/httpd.conf . This required the administrative password. The comments in httpd.conf are excellent, once you find them.

I discovered this by reading the page accessible as http://localhost .

P.S. A year later (May 2005) I installed OS 10.4 which indeed updated the file httpd.conf . It took me an hour to find this here file. (Much better than a day) This time I changed DocumentRoot too. Then I spent 1/2 hour confused at the browser’s cache. Did it used to cache 404 responses? Seems like it shouldn’t.