I'm working in a hosted situation where I have a primary webroot located in ~/www. I have several subdomains hosted in ~/www/__subdomains. In the primary webroot, I have a .htaccess file that does a bit of minor rewriting. In two of my subdomains, I have similar .htaccess files and these subdomains respond properly.
In 2 other, newly created subdomains, I have .htaccess files that are empty save for an AddHandler directive. What I'm finding is that the root .htaccess file's existence/content affects these 2 subdomains. They throw a 500 error. As soon as I rename that one, the broken subdomains work.
This, of course, breaks the other sites so I can't just move this off, but it violates my understanding of how .htaccess recursion works. I thought that as long as there was a .htaccess file in a subdirectory, those in ancestor directories would never get executed.
Clearly, I'm wrong about that so I'm hoping someone can educate me and help me get this fixed.
Thanks.