OK, I am admittedly a noob when it comes to Linux administration, so forgive a stoopid question. And yes, of course, I have searched the forums without success. Here are the particulars:

Linode 360 plan > Ubuntu 8.04 LTS > Apache2 > WordPress MU 2.6.2

Because I'm running WPMU with pretty permalinks, I need to be able to use .htaccess files. However, the system seems to keep deleting the .htaccess file that I'm putting in there.

In my VirtualHost file for the site holisticnetworking.net, I've added the line 'AllowOverride All' into the home directory, but this isn't changing the situation.

Does anyone have any idea why this would be?

1. File names beginning with a dot are considered "hidden" in Linux. In order to see them, you'll need to use a command such as

ls -a

(FTP clients such as FileZilla will often display hidden files, too.)

2. Did you enable mod_rewrite in Apache?

a2enmod rewrite
/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload