SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1835 Malformed communication packet on LARAVEL

Question

Suddenly got

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1835 Malformed communication packet (SQL: select * from tb_users where (username =

Answer 1

I'm on Ubuntu 20 (focal), note my repo you'll need to change it depending on if your on 16 (xenial), 18 (bionic) or whatever

I don't like the options fix in Laravel with the risk it could corrupt data, and I can't upgrade PHP to 7.2+ without a lot of work so for me I downgraded a version.

Going from 10.3.26 -> 10.3.25 without restoring all the data from a dump is not recommended but I had no choice, and it appears nothing bad happened.

# stop the database

service mariadb stop

# list packages installed

dpkg -l | grep mariadb 

# remove whatever you have or the install will complain about dependencies or broken packages, you need to remove all the mariadb packages

apt remove mariadb-server-core-10.3 
apt remove mariadb-server-10.3
apt remove mariadb-server-10.2
apt remove mariadb-server-10.1

# pin the repo to v10.3.25, remember to remove any conflicting sources you have in /etc/apt/sources.list

apt-get install software-properties-common
apt-key adv --fetch-keys 'https://mariadb.org/mariadb_release_signing_key.asc'
add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64,arm64,ppc64el] http://archive.mariadb.org/mariadb-10.3.25/repo/ubuntu/ focal main'

# install the old version

apt install mariadb-server

# start it back up

service mariadb start