LEMP multisite: edin grid pages ==> 404

dear experts—I am just starting out. I “quasi”-successfully installed wp with nginx and multisite. For nginx, I have a minimal config file:


server {

server_name example.com *.example.com;

access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.error.log;

root /var/www/example.com/html;

location / {
try_files /index.php?q=$uri&$args $uri $uri/ =404;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include fastcgi_params;
}

location ~* ^.+\.(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|rss|atom|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|ta\
r|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
expires max;
}

location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location ~ /\. { deny all; access_log off; log_not_found off; }

location ~ /\.htaccess {
deny all;
}
}

I can create and work with my domains and subdomains. I work (for now) exclusively with pages and not posts. I can create new child pages and they appear nicely automatically in my edin-grid themed parent page. so I know they exist in the wordpress storage. I can see them; I can edit them.

alas, when I visit my new site to see how it will look like, I can see the parent page with its grid displaying child pages (correct “grid” title). but when I then try to click on the child pages, they lead to 404 pages, like

http://example.com/6-2/university-instructor-manager/

(my permalinks are set to http://example.com/2015/09/20/sample-post/ , but these do not seem to be the permalinks that are being created, presumably because these apply to posts and not pages.)

the nginx log tells me

45.49.142.111 – – [20/Sep/2015:07:52:01 -0700] “GET /6-2/university-instructor-manager/ HTTP/1.1” 404 208 “http://example.com/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.93 Safari/537.36”

this happens both on the main domain and the subdomains. I have not tinkered with the wp code. I just used the edin theme (though I did experiment around, e.g., with different themes and pages before I got here—all of which I deleted). so, my setup seems vanilla.

I believe wp serves up virtual pages—the entire filesystem does not contain ‘university-instructor-manager’ , so this should presumably be generated from its SQL page store.

I do not just need a fish, but I need to learn how to go fishing. is it true that php and wp should have taken over URL page responses and generated the page? and how do I debug a problem like this?

advice appreciated.

/iaw