Ubuntu Servers :: HTAccess Stopped Working For 301 Apache2

I am not sure what happened, but my .htaccess file is no longer working for my 301 redirects. I did have a hard time getting it working a few weeks back (when I first set it up), unfortunately I did not document it well. Main question is for multiple sites getting redirected, do I want the additional sites listed as aliases? My original setup virtual host config listed seven additional hostnames as aliases.

I later had difficulty with google listing these secondary domains within search result and hurting my page rank. So I setup 301 redirects, and from memory, I had to leave the alias names for the .htacces 301 redirect to work. Now it won't work either way. Can anyone tell me if the aliases need to be in place? Do I need to setup individual vhost files and add an .htacces 301 for each? What is the preferred way to do this? I tried reloading apache2 but it did not help.

Permissions for .htacces:
Code:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 eric www-data 866 2010-04-14 12:06 .htaccess
Attaced is my .htaccess. It resides in the site root directory. Also attached is the virtual host config file.
httpd.conf

Code:
NameVirtualHost *
NameVirtualHost *:443
AddHandler cgi-script .pl
RewriteEngine On

I'm still not sure after hours of reading the various how-to's, what should the file permissions be for the .htaccess. I have not performed any updates during the period it was working till now.