Besides the several typos that were reflected in my above post: it seemed it didn't want to take the directives in /var/www/virtualbox/.htaccess .

I moved similar directives between <Directory /> tags in the site conf (000-default, i think in this case) and it worked. Now to get it going in a script.

I can't account from the docs why it would work in the site conf but not in the .htaccess file. any ideas?