DocumentRoot does not exist, when it does

I have recently yum installed apache 2 for a development server. I have copied the config from our live server (which works) and set up an example site.

When I got to start apache (service httpd start) I get the following error:

Starting httpd: Warning: DocumentRoot [/home/mysite] does not exist
[ OK ]

The directory does exist and has files in it to server as a website.

Here is the virtualhost conf for this website:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@mysite.com
ServerName www.mysite.com
ServerAlias mysite.com
DocumentRoot "/home/mysite"
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
<Directory /home/mysite>
AllowOverride All
RewriteEngine On
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Is it a permission thing? The folders are 755 (root).

Thanks for any help in advance.

Does the Apache user (usually nobody or www) have read rights on /home/mysite?

This is often the result of saving a file in the wrong format for a given platform - for example saving a file in Windows text format and then using this file on a linux box.

A good example is a PERL script saved as Windows text, but run on linux machine - the initial line of the script (the shebang) will contain a line something like...

...but because the file has been saved as windows text attempts to run the script will result "file not found" error messages because the linux environment is looking for "#!/usr/bin/perl<nl><cr>" (which of course doesn't exist) instead of just "#!/usr/bin/perl".

Hope this helps.