Apache 2 mod_rewrite Inconsistent Results

Question

My former university, SPSU, was "consolidated" into Kennesaw State University. I used to have the domain bbrown.spsu.edu. As a temporary fix, bbrown.kennesaw.edu was set up by University IT. However, the permanent home for my web pages should be http://ksuweb/faculty/rbrow211. I have administrative control of the server with the two "bbrown" domains. I've put the following into httpd.conf:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName bbrown.spsu.edu
ServerAlias www.bbrown.spsu.edu
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/faculty/rbrow211%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName bbrown.kennesaw.edu
ServerAlias www.bbrown.kennesaw.edu
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/faculty/rbrow211%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

These two URLs behave as I expect, and redirect to the proper internal page on ksuweb:
http://bbrown.spsu.edu/misc/university_success.html
http://bbrown.kennesaw.edu/misc/university_success.html

However the first one of these works and the second does not! It redirects to the index page at the top level, i.e. to http://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/faculty/rbrow211/
http://bbrown.spsu.edu/it3203/2016_02/lab_7s.html
http://bbrown.kennesaw.edu/it3203/2016_02/lab_7s.html

but these two, with two levels of directory, work as expected:
http://bbrown.spsu.edu/it3123/2016_02/assign_0_classroom.html
http://bbrown.kennesaw.edu/it3123/2016_02/assign_0_classroom.html

I am utterly baffled. My question? What have I done wrong?

Answer 1

All these appear to redirect OK for me (ie. http://bbrown.kennesaw.edu/it3203/2016_02/lab_7s.html redirects to http://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/faculty/rbrow211/it3203/2016_02/lab_7s.html). So, this would seem to suggest a local caching issue. If you've previously experimented with erroneous 301 redirects, then these will have been cached by the browser and possibly any intermediary caches.

To avoid caching, either test with 302 (temporary) redirects. Or test with browser caching disabled. (In Google Chrome, you can open the Object Inspector and on the "Network" tab, check the "Disable cache" option.)

The redirect code looks OK. The RewriteRule pattern could perhaps be simplified to .* or even ^ (since you aren't using the captured group in the substitution) - but that won't make any difference in usage.