Broken wp-config.php linking on debian system with multiple blogs

If you are familiar with debian’s somewhat convoluted way of supporting multiple blogs from one core wp install I could sure use your help.

A little background
My home server is running debian lenny and had a working installation of wp 2.9.
This morning my buddy, who had admin privileges (they have now been revoked) on his instance of wp decided he’d be helpful and update wordpress for us. I’d allowed him admin privileges to facilitate his own installing and updating of plugins.
The problem
His attempt at installing was unsuccessful. And now after getting wp 3.0.1 files uploaded manually and properly symlinking each blog located in /var/www/ to the core install files located in /usr/share/wordpress/ I get an error:

There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file. I need this before we can get started. Need more help? We got it. You can create a wp-config.php file through a web interface, but this doesn’t work for all server setups. The safest way is to manually create the file.

Create a Configuration File

The needed wp-config.php files exist. They are located in /etc/wordpress/ and are named config-sitename.php and are owned by root:www-data. However, I don’t remember how these were symlinked in the whole rigamarole and my attempts at fixing this are met with the same error.

1. I thought it would work if I linked /etc/wordpress/config-sitename.php to each blog instance in /var/www/sitename/ but that didn’t work. I tried doing this with a variety of permissions–www-data:root, root:www-data, root:root–for the symlink and no dice.
2. I tried circumventing all this and just copying the contents of each config-sitename.php file in /etc/wordpress/ into a wp-config.php file in each blogs directory.

No dice.

I’d sure appreciate some help fixing this. I was all gun-ho about journaling my week; now I’m just as gun-ho about fixing this so I can journal some rules of thumb concerning permissions and rights management.

Thanks,

David