Multisite sub-domains not working

After attempting more ambitious, multilingual, social networking installations, I have eventually given up, gone with a simple, monolingual, WP only installation. The only “complication” being I am using the Catalan language version (which seems to have a bug in the installation script so there maybe other problems).

Anyway, having eventually ended up deleting the whole hosting account on my (dedicated) server – so completely clean install, but with wildard DNS functioning for months on a previous attempt) I get as far as setting up the main site (works fine) and start creating subdomains.

None of them are visible, though they point to the server, with the frustrating and now ever-so-slightly-irritating Apache “Great Success” message and a /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi URL. The dashboard link produces a 404 for /wp-admin. I’ve followed the instructions to the T – in theory with 3.1 there is very little that can go wrong, all things being equal. Trouble is, they’re not, are they?!

Any ideas as it’s 5am and I’ve been at it/google all night!

Thanks {:}=)