Redirect Using htaccess

Question

I am trying to redirect /folder to / using .htaccess but all am I getting is the Apache HTTP Server Test Page. My root directory looks like this:

/
.htaccess
-/folder
-/folder2
-/folder3

My .htaccess looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/folder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ folder/$1 [L]

What am I doing wrong? I checked my httpd.conf (I'm running Centos 5.3) and the mod_rewrite library is being loaded. As a side note, my server is not a www server, its simply a virtual machine so its hostname is centosvm.

Addition: I have found that the mod_rewrite module is loaded, but none of my .htaccess redirects seem to be working.

Addition: My httpd.conf directory directive looks like:

<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    #AllowOverride None
</Directory>

Answer 1

What does you AllowOverride say? (see: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/htaccess.html)

---

And that would bring us to requiring this in (virtual)host/directory settings:

AllowOverride FileInfo