I needed to import a large (~400MB) db for local testing. I did a mysqldump on the server, zipped, and then ftp’d it to my local machine where I was going to poke around with it using MAMP. However when I tried to import it via the command line, it would barf eventually with the error “ERROR 1153 (08S01) at line 988: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes” message. Here’s how to fix it.

In Terminal cd to mamp’s bin folder:

cd /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/

try to import the database:

./mysql -u username -p database < /path/to/file_to_import.sql

you’ll probably get an error like:

ERROR 1153 (08S01) at line 988: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes

What you want to do is fix the ‘max_allowed_packet’ size in the my.cnf file. But where is it in MAMP? It’s actually nowhere. There are a few sample files that you can use and then copy to a certain directory. I got that info from http://forum.mamp.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6306#p12075

I copied the conf (my-large.cnf) file from /Applications/MAMP/Library/share/mysql to /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/

Rename it my.cnf

Edit the settings as needed (username, password, port)

I needed to change the port from 9999 to 3306
And I bumped up the max_allowed_packet size to 64mb just to make sure it really imported the file

Save my.cnf

Restart MAMP

Retry the import command

It should work. If not, try bumping up the max_allowed_packet size again. You can always lower it when you’re done.

I have recently been trying to set stuff up locally on my windows laptop to mess around with some things. For the server set up I’m using WAMP (Windows, Apache, mySQL, PHP). Some of the software I’m messing around with locally are WordPress, Magento, osCommerce, Drupal, and osTicket.

All but osTicket were an absolute breeze to install, download, set up the DB, install, and start playing.

osTicket was a total pain though, first off, they only use the php short tags – <? and ?> instead of the “regular” tags – <?php and ?>. This issue is immediately apparent when you start setting up osTicket and all the form fields are filled with php code! Luckily the fix to this was easy – all I had to do was enable “short_open_tag” in the php.ini to “On”.

The php.ini file is located in your WAMP directory in the “bin/php/php5.2.6″ folder and for me it was on line #131. Obviously your php version might be different, but there’s only one folder in there so it shouldn’t be hard to find.

There’s also another php.ini file located in the “bin/apache/apache2.2.8/bin” folder. Again though the “short_open_tag” line is on line #131.

Once you have that you’re halfway there. If you’re using WAMP you’re probably as lazy as me and haven’t changed the default username and password to the database, ie it’s “root” and there isn’t a password defined. osTicket REALLY REALLY wants you to have a password, but there are two places you can change the code to remove that requirement.

The first place to remove the password requirement is in the setup script. The setup script is located in your osTicket folder, in the “setup” folder. Edit the file “index.php” and on line #53 change the line from:

$f['dbpass']    = array(‘type’=>’string’, ‘required’=>1, ‘error’=>’password required’);

To:

$f['dbpass']    = array(‘type’=>’string’, ‘required’=>0, ‘error’=>’password required’);

We changed the ‘required’=>1 to ‘required’=>0 there, just incase you missed it.

OK, the next change we need to do is sneaky, osTicket checks whether or not there is a database password defined in the function to connect to the database. Why they do this I have no freaking idea, this is what took me forever to find, and totally irritated me!

To fix the database connection function, in your osTicket folder, go into the “includes” folder, and then open the file named “mysql.php”. On line #21, change the code from:

if(!strlen($dbuser) || !strlen($dbpass) || !strlen($dbhost))

To:

if(!strlen($dbuser) || !strlen($dbhost))

So here all we did was remove the “|| !strlen($dbpass)” code that checks for the database password. Ridiculous.

And there you go! You should now be on your way to ticketing fun on your windows computer! Enjoy!