.htaccess not updating (multisite problem?)

Hey there,

I was running a blog using pretty permalinks, and everything was dandy. This weekend, I decided to convert the blog into a series of multisite blogs, and followed the instructions with no real problems until I tried to enable pretty permalinks on the new sites. Nothing happened when I saved the changes on the permalinks page – I checked, and the .htaccess file was not changed.

I tried to change the permalinks settings on the original blog, but I can’t change those settings successfully either. I can enable pretty permalinks with the existing settings (i.e. domain.com/%postname%/), or disable (i.e. domain.com?p=123), but I can’t switch to another type of permalink there either. Again, the .htaccess is never updated.

I tried deleting the .htaccess to see if WordPress would create a new one, but no, all that did was break the images on my multisite blogs. A new .htaccess was never created.

I thought it was probably a permissions option, so I tried to change the permissions on .htaccess to 777, but that made no difference. I also chowned .htaccess to apache:apache, but again, no dice. The permissions are now identical to those of the file upload folder (which is working perfectly across all sites), but the file is never changed. What confuses me the most is that I never get any kind of error from WordPress about permissions or even being unable to write to the file. I’m turning here in the hopes that someone may shed some light on even a new idea for debugging, let alone a solution to the issue.

Here is my current .htaccess, for reference:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

Thanks in advance,

Christopher Little