troubles getting ms-elgg to work in a shared hosting environment

[zilog]

Hello,

Thanks Marcus for publishing your project, I'm very excited about
giving it ago. Unfortunately I am having problems setting it up. I
have followed the instructions in this page step by step, except for
the wildcard domain thing. My installation lives in a shared hosting
env, so I do not have access to the httpd.conf file. I do not know if
this can be done from .htaccess though.

Everything works fine, I can get into the master domain as an admin,
create new elgg sites, etc. But the "install" link on each site takes
me nowehere, if I enter "subdomain.rootdomain.tld" as domain name for
the newly created elgg site, the link will point to whatever I enter
in that field. Which of course is a non-existing subdomain. If I go to
my hosting panel and create that subdomain, I cannot change the
docroot. So I am fairly stuck now.

Is there any URI based trickery that could show the right instance of
elgg depending on some cgi params? That way maybe I could do a poor-
man's subdomain handling at the .htaccess level of my root domain.

Accessing the docroot directly Elgg says:
Welcome to Elgg.
Elgg couldn't connect to the database using the given credentials.

[Marcus Povey]

Hrrm...

Unfortunately the site selection is determined by the vhost the code
is being accessed on, and while this doesn't require a wildcard domain
(although this makes admin infinitely easier), it does require
appropriate vhosts to be configured in apache.

I'm not aware of any htaccess hacks for this, but I could be wrong...

Marcus