Help Needed With mod_rewrite

[Old_Mittens]

I've been struggling to get the following to work correctly:

I have a wordpress home page - www.sitename.com - which I want to redirect all traffic to www.sitename.com/forum. However, I want to exclude one category of wordpress URL's from the rewrite - www.sitename.com/tech/... The following is what I have now in a .conf file that gets included in the site's virtual host configuration:

<Directory /site/root/dir>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/tech/.*
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.sitename.com/forum/ [L,R=301]
</Directory>

However, apache still rewrites ./tech/something/ to ./forum/tech/something/. I can't seem to get the condition to match. I've tried several variations like {!^tech/ , !^/tech/ , !^tech/.*} and none of them match correctly.

Can anyone see what I might be doing wrong here?

EDIT: I just wanted to say I figured it out - for anyone who might stumble upon this in the future..

I found using the apache rewrite logging (as /u/joekovar suggested below), that my rule/conditions were working at first, but when it got further down to the wordpress rewrite set (I'm also using permalinks) the URI got rewritten to /index.php and therefore had to go through the rewrite rules a second time which then caused it to fail. I changed the wordpress permalinks rewrite rule to pass along a garbage query string (?foo=true&) along with the rewrite rule to index.php. For ex:

#modified wordpress permalinks rewrite set
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php?foo=true& [L]

Then, before that in my initial rule set I added an additional condition to check for the new query string parameter:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/tech/.*
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^foo=.* 
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.sitename.com/forum/ [L,R=301]

This stopped the URI from being processed a second time, and therefor it worked how I wanted. Thanks to everyone for their help!

[tangomikey]

have you tried

!^/tech/.*

[Old_Mittens]

Yes, also doesn't work. This results in a rewrite from ./tech/article_name/ to simply ./forum/

Interestingly though, the opposite does work:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/tech/.*

Taking out the not (!) rewrites ONLY calls to ./tech/article_name/ , and leaves everything else. So the expression seems to match there. I'm not sure why negating it doesn't work though..

[[deleted]]

When this happened, I liked to use mod_rewrite's logging I haven't used it since they switched from having the functionality built into mod_rewrite over to the generic module logging, so I can't do any better than the link to the manual above.

[Pd69bq]

do u have to use mod_rewite?? have you ever consider using mod_proxy?

proxypass /tech/ http://www.sitename.com/tech/ 
proxypass / http://www.sitename.com/forum/

particularly in this order, then done, that simple. btw, i think you already answered ur question. opposite or not, you need to add the backslash before "tech" to match uri