Instead of a service restart, maybe you need to reboot the machine entirely.
That's really never necessary unless you've upgraded the kernel. There is nothing you can do to Apache, AFAIK, that will not take effect on a "service httpd restart". So likely there is some problem with those rules.
After a long search and lots of trial and error, I managed to get the following to work reliably for me:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [L,R,NC]Don't ask me what it does or why it works. All I know is that, if the server receives a request for any page on that site which does not come in on port 443, it will rewrite the address (for the exact same page) to start with HTTPS and redirect to that page. So no matter what page you request, you will be served that page via the secure server.
Works like a charm, has done so for several months now. No errors or problems reported so far.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
