[johane]

Originally Posted by fathernitwit

might help
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/gone-away.html

if you find the solution, please post it on the wiki, this has been run into several times, but I cannot recall the solution

Worth reminding people that if you have logging turned on in mysql, and have set to log hostnames (not just ip addresses), then unless you have good name resolution (i.e. right entries in /etc/hosts or equivalent, or a local nameserver with in-addr.arpa zones properly set up) you can get DB timeouts very very easily.