Drupal 6: user warning: Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes

I just the following error when loading a large cck node form:

user warning: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes

You can resolve this error by adding a line to your /etc/my.cnf MySQL configuration:

[mysqld]
set-variable = max_allowed_packet=32M

You can also change this variable without restarting MySQL.

mysql --execute="show variables" | grep -ir max_allowed_packet
max_allowed_packet  16777216

mysql --execute="set global max_allowed_packet=33554432"

mysql --execute="show variables" | grep -ir max_allowed_packet
max_allowed_packet  33554432