.htaccess not working… what am I doing wrong.

Is there some WP secret sauce that’s involved in using .htaccess for url rewriting? Am I editing the wrong file?

I’m pointing my old coldfusion site at my shiny new wordpress instance and I want to handle old links gracefully.

Based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of mod_rewrite. I would expect that going to:

https://mydoman.com/validwppage.cfm

would take me to:

https://mydomain.com/validwppage/

But instead I just get a WP 404 error when I use the rules below.

# For rewrite rules needed for making WordPress URL friendly
# See Options -> Permalinks for details and please use the defaults,
# especially in mind when hosting several blogs on one machine!

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# remove .cfm extension and add trailing slash
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.cfm$ $1/
# WordPress stuff below this

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

</IfModule>

# END WordPress

.htaccess file is in my site’s root directory (/var/www)