Trying to get htaccess to work...or...man, what am I doing w…

I have a RH7.2 box with apache 1.3.22.    

/var/www/html is where the html docs live

/var/www/html/test is the directory I want to protect


I created a user file in my home directory ~/user

I use htpasswd -c ~user someone to populate the access file

There is an .htaccess file in /var/www/html/test

it looks like this

AuthName "restricted stuff"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile ~/user

require valid-user



It quite simply does not work.

I read the docs here http://www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth and
here http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/faqs/RH-apache-FAQ/c135.html

I have tried this in the httpd.conf file


# This controls which options the .htaccess files in directories can
# override. Can also be "All", or any combination of "Options", "FileInfo",
# "AuthConfig", and "Limit"

###AllowOverride None                        this didn't work
###AllowOverride AuthConfig               this didn't work either

and yes, I removed the hashes when I tested it.


I didn't think it would be this much of a pain.....aarrgh



Anthony