[rt-users] Found a true cause and a possible resolution to the "MySQL server has gone away" issue

[Nick Metrowsky]

Hi Jesse,

Thank you for writing and your correction I appreciate it. While there
is one connection to MySQL as you say via port 3306. I know cookies are
involved from the web browser to Request Tracker to MySQL, because the
cookie session identifiers show up in the MySQL detail transaction logs.
I am not sure if this is an Explorer problem (timeout the cookies) or a
network drop problem (could also timeout a cookie or at least corrupt
the seesion). I have not seen this problem on Firefox, Mozilla or
Netscape. Finally, this problem occurs in 1 in 1000 tickets, which for
us is about once per month.

The Request Tracker code does assume that you have a valid connection to
MySQL and a valid database handle. I have seen this is at least a couple
areas of the code. This seems logical, because if you are logged in to
Request Tracker one can assume you have a connection to the MySQL
database, as well. The things I would recommend here is to verify that a
connection to MySQL is still active, as well as the session, before
attempting to write to the database. Also, only have Request Tracker
send out e-mails after it verifies that a ticket has been written to the
database. We can live with the error, but we need a fix to prevent the
e-mail from going out as it really frustrates our staff that a ticket is
not in the database.

As I mentioned, I just wanted to tell folks about what we have been
seeing at our site. I also wanted to mention that we have seen this
occur on laptops that are moved from one location to another, with
Request Tracker still logged in. The person having the problem told me
that "come to think of it, I always move my laptop while in Request
Tracker and the error has usually occurred sometime after I have done
it". This provided me with enough compelling evidence to tell our site
to log out of Request Tracker, before moving a laptop. The jury is still
out on this one.

All in all, Request Tracker is a very good product. Our IS departments
and several departments at my company really like the software. The only
complaint is this one issue. Also, we have been using the software for
over four years and plan to continue to use it for the foreseeable
future. Once things get stable, we plan to move from 3.4.4 to 3.6.x.

Thank you again for writing and I hope that something good comes out of
this.

Take care!

Nick

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Nick Metrowsky
Consulting System Administrator
303-684-4785 Office
303-684-4100 Fax
nmetrowsky at digitalglobe.com
DigitalGlobe (r), An Imaging and Information Company
http://www.digitalglobe.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Vincent [mailto:jesse at bestpractical.com] 
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 4:30 PM
To: Nick Metrowsky
Cc: RT Users
Subject: Re: [rt-users] Found a true cause and a possible resolution to
the "MySQL server has gone away" issue

> 
> and MySQL is informed that the user will be connecting to to MySQL
with
> the cookie identifier as the database handle to establish the
> connection. 

That is not correct. RT shares one connection across all users.