This just cost me twenty minutes of hair pulling and from the number of unanswered forum and mailing lists mentions of this “Lost connection to MySQL server during query” error in the context of remote access through an SSH tunnel, posting the solution seems useful.

Letting mysqld listen to the outside is a security risk – and an unnecessary one for the common LAMP setup on which the applications are executed on the same server as the database server. As a result, many Mysql servers are configured with the “skip-networking” option which prevents it from listening for TCP/IP connections at all. Local communication is still possible through the mysql.sock socket.

Nowadays, communicating through local sockets is rather rare – connecting locally is usually done through the TCP/IP stack which is less efficient but more flexible. So the naive user who expects TCP/IP everywhere sets up a tunnel to the Mysql server he usually accesses locally, he provides the right connection parameters to his Mysql client – and on his connection attempt he gets the “Lost connection to MySQL server during query” error.

So – when connecting through ssh tunnel to a mysql daemon, you need to make sure that the “skip-networking” option has been removed from /etc/my.cnf

When the “skip-networking” option is active, network parameters are redundant. But once you remove it, for security’s sake you must make sure that mysqld does not listen to the outside – so check /etc/my.cnf so that the “bind-adress” parameter is set as “bind-address = 127.0.0.1”.