[TriLUG] mysql weirdness

[Jeff The Riffer]

I have a server with a monthly cron job that rotates a large mysql 
database (syslog records). It's been working fine for months. Than 
sometime in August it stopped working.I didn't notice until today thanks 
to not having previously been forwarding e-mail from root.
(woops)

Ok, so now the script does a mysqldump on an archive database, purges the 
database, copies the existing syslog data to the archive database and then 
deletes the archived data from the live DB.

Now everyone one of these steps generates the same error:

 	ERROR 2003: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'hostname' (110)

Which is quite strange, since mysqld is running, I can interactively 
connect and everything is running normally as far as I can tell. It takes 
a rather long time for the error to pop-up but I can reproduce it from the 
command-line.

So I'm stumped. Why would:

mysqldump -a -B syslogarchiveDB -C -e -F -h hostname -u root -ppassword > syslog-dumps/syslog.0

give an error but:

mysql -u root -ppassword

work fine? *scratches head*

Any suggestions? If mysqld has a debug mode I'd like to enable it.

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