A reason for getting com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: Communications link failure

Sometimes you will end up in getting an exception like below when starting a server pointed to MySQL DB.

ERROR - DatabaseUtil Database Error - Communications link failure

The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 milliseconds ago. The driver has not received any packets from the server.
com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException: Communications link failure

The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 milliseconds ago. The driver has not received any packets from the server


One possible reason can be since you have mapped, bind-address to an IP in /etc/mysql/my.cnf

The default is 0.0.0.0 which is all interfaces. This setting does not restrict which IPs can access the server, unless you specified 127.0.0.1 for localhost only or some other IP.

bind-address            = 0.0.0.0

Once this is done, restart mysql server.

 sudo service mysql restart