I migrated a Kohana2 application from a shared-hosting environment over to a virtual dedicated server. After this migration, I can't seem to get my .htaccess file working again. I apologize up front, but over the years I have never experienced so much frustration with anything else as I do with the dreaded .htaccess file. Presently I have my project installed immediately within a directory in my public folder:

/var/html/www/info.php (general information about server)
/var/html/www/logo.jpg (some flat file)
/var/html/www/somesite.com/[kohana site exists here]

So my .htaccess file is within that directory, and has the following contents:

# Turn on URL rewriting
RewriteEngine On

# Installation directory
RewriteBase /somesite.com/

# Protect application and system files from being viewed
# This is only necessary when these files are inside the webserver document root
RewriteRule ^(application|modules|system) - [R=404,L]

# Allow any files or directories that exist to be displayed directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# Rewrite all other URLs to index.php/URL
RewriteRule .* index.php?kohana_uri=$0 [PT,QSA,L]

# Alternativly, if the rewrite rule above does not work try this instead:
#RewriteRule .* index.php?kohana_uri=$0 [PT,QSA,L]

This doesn't work. The initial controller is loaded, since index.php is called up implicitly when nothing else is in the url. But if I try to load up some other non-default controller, the site fails. If I place the index.php back within the url, the call to other controllers works just fine.

I'm really at my wits end, and would appreciate some direction here.