More rarely, it can happen when the client is attempting the initial connection to the server. In this case, if your connect_timeout value is set to only a few seconds, you may be able to resolve the problem by increasing it to ten seconds, perhaps more if you have a very long distance or slow connection. You can determine whether you are experiencing this more uncommon cause by using SHOW STATUS LIKE ‘aborted_connections’. It will increase by one for each initial connection attempt that the server aborts. You may see “reading authorization packet” as part of the error message; if so, that also suggests that this is the solution that you need.

Try increasing connect_timeout in your my.cnf file

Another style:

MySQL: Lost connection to MySQL server at ‘reading initial communication packet’

  1. At some point, it was impossible for remote clients to connect to the MySQL server.
  2. The client (some application on a Windows platform) gave a vague description like Connection unexpectedly terminated.
  3. When remotely logging in with the MySQL client the following error appeared:
    ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 0

On FreeBSD this happens because there was no match found in /etc/hosts.allow. Adding the following line before the line saying ALL:ALL fixes this:

mysqld: ALL: allow

On non-FreeBSD Unix systems, it is worth to check the files /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny. If you are restricting connections, make sure this line is in /etc/hosts.allow:

mysqld: ALL

or check if the host is listed in /etc/hosts.deny.

In Arch Linux, a similar line can be added to /etc/hosts.allow:

mysqld: ALL