I was wondering what are the common things you should look at when debugging a new subdomain not being picked up correctly by apache.
Here are the steps I followed to create the sub-domain;
I copied the setup file from an existing (working) domain in sites-available.
sudo cp old new
Then I edited this to work with the new site (replace 'old' with 'new')
< VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName new.srv.co.uk
DocumentRoot /srv/www/new/public_html/
ErrorLog /srv/www/new/logs/error.log
CustomLog /srv/www/new/logs/access.log combined
< /VirtualHost>
I then created the link in the sites-enabled folder.
ls -s ../sites-available/new new
The next step was to create the appropriate directories in /srv/www/ and gave them the same permissions as other site already listed there.
Finally I restarted apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
It restarts fine but the URL will not work for the site.
If I edit the file in sites-available to break it (remove the '*' for example) apache fails to restart, so I know it is finding that file OK.
There is nothing in the error log and browsers are reporting things like 'Firefox can't find the server at ...'
The browser is telling you that it cannot reslove the hostname to an address. You need to create a DNS A or CNAME entry that will resolve your new domain to the IP address of the server that is hosting your apache server.