nginx hanging for subdomain - php

Question

I'm having some trouble getting nginx to work on a subdomain. I have two conf files in /etc/nginx/conf.d/ as follows (some details in the first redacted):
mydomain.conf: the site proper, server_name of mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com:
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/sites/mydomain;
index index.php;
server_name mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/mydomain.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/mydomain.error.log;
...
}
phpmyadmin.conf:
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/sites/phpmyadmin;
index index.php;
server_name pma.mydomain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/phpmyadmin.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/phpmyadmin.error.log;
location / {
index index.php;
}
location ~* \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}
Currently, /var/www/sites/phpmyadmin just contains an index.php with <?php phpinfo(): ?> in it and nothing else. This is on an EC2 instance and I'm trying to load the pages from another computer, wherein both mydomain.com and pma.mydomain.com are set to its IP address in my /etc/hosts.
Navigating to mydomain.com works perfectly fine, PHP works, etc. However when I navigate to the subdomain, it hangs. For any other subdomain the connection immediately fails (there are no DNS records). But for pma it simply doesn't load.
My log files for pma are empty and unhelpful. I have no idea how to debug this silent failure and it's driving me insane.

Answer 1

Probably an issue with the FastCGI handler (are you using php-fpm?) running at 127.0.0.1:9000 - is it running and accepting connections?
Debug it by SSHing to that machine and running:
curl -vv http://127.0.0.1:9000/
What happens?