I ran into the same problem.  I have a TurnKey LAMP 11.1 server running on VMware and I have been using TKLBAM to back it up to an in-house backup server.  The backups work great but when I tested the restore on a new TurnKey LAMP 11.1 vm the restore crashed with the same "Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes" error mentioned above.

If you don't want to permanently reconfigure your mysql server to do the restore you can login to your TKL server as root and run the following commands before running tklbam-restore.

# the following will set max_allowed_packet to 100MB
mysql -p -e 'SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet=100*1024*1024;'

# the following will verify the mysql server accepted the new setting
mysql -p -e 'SELECT @@global.max_allowed_packet;'

This setting will only last until the mysql server is restarted.

Liraz, I wonder if this can be incorporated into TKLBAM mysql.py somehow so this can be done without the end user knowing about it?  Thanks for looking into it.

First we'll need to hack TKLBAM so it keeps around the "mysqlfs" file structure your MySQL backup is stored in. Normally this is deleted. Apply this patch to tklbam's source code:

diff --git a/restore.py b/restore.py
index 8094d11..576486d 100644
--- a/restore.py
+++ b/restore.py
@@ -87,6 +87,7 @@ class Restore:

         extras_path = TempDir(prefix="tklbam-extras-")
         os.rename(backup_archive + backup.Backup.EXTRAS_PATH, extras_path)
+        shutil.copytree(extras_path, "/tmp/extras")

         self.extras = backup.ExtrasPaths(extras_path)
         self.rollback = Rollback.create() if rollback else None

#!/usr/bin/python
"""
Map a filesystem created by mysql2fs back to MySQL

Options:
    --tofile=PATH           Write mysqldump output to file (- for STDOUT)
    -v --verbose            Turn on verbosity

    --skip-extended-insert  Skip extended insert (useful in debugging)
    --add-drop-database     Drop databases and then recreate them

Supports the following subset of mysql(1) options:

    -u --user=USER 
    -p --password=PASS

       --defaults-file=PATH
       --host=HOST

"""
import sys
import getopt

import mysql

def usage(e=None):
    if e:
        print >> sys.stderr, "error: " + str(e)

    print >> sys.stderr, "Syntax: %s [-options] path/to/myfs [ -?database/table ... ] " % sys.argv[0]
    print >> sys.stderr, __doc__.strip()
    sys.exit(1)

def main():
    try:
        opts, args = getopt.gnu_getopt(sys.argv[1:], 'u:p:v', 
                                       ['verbose', 'tofile=',
                                        'skip-extended-insert',
                                        'add-drop-database',
                                        'user=', 'password=', 'defaults-file=', 'host='])
    except getopt.GetoptError, e:
        usage(e)

    opt_verbose = False
    opt_tofile = None
    opt_skip_extended_insert = False
    opt_add_drop_database = False
    myconf = {}
    for opt, val in opts:
        if opt in ('-v', '--verbose'):
            opt_verbose = True
        elif opt == '--tofile':
            opt_tofile = val
        elif opt == '--skip-extended-insert':
            opt_skip_extended_insert = True
        elif opt == '--add-drop-database':
            opt_add_drop_database = True
        elif opt in ('-u', '--user'):
            myconf['user'] = val
        elif opt in ('-p', '--password'):
            myconf['password'] = val
        elif opt == "--defaults-file":
            myconf['defaults_file'] = val
        elif opt == "--host":
            myconf['host'] = val
        else:
            usage()

    if not args:
        usage()

    myfs = args[0]
    limits = args[1:]

    if opt_tofile:
        if opt_tofile == '-':
            fh = sys.stdout
        else:
            fh = file(opt_tofile, "w")
    else:
        fh = mysql.mysql(**myconf)

    callback = None
    if opt_verbose:
        print "destination: " + fh.name
        callback = mysql.cb_print()

    if opt_verbose:
        pass

    mysql.fs2mysql(fh, myfs, limits, callback, 
                   opt_skip_extended_insert,
                   opt_add_drop_database)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

./fs2mysql.py /tmp/extras/myfs --tofile=/tmp/mymysqldump

I'm getting the same error when I try and restore.  It says out of memory, but no amount of RAM I throw at it helps.  Did anyone ever try manually restoring the mysqldump?  Did it work?

I would use nano to edit your my.cnf and make sure you save. Perhaps if you stop MySQL first and then edit it, save it and restart MySQL. So something like this:

service mysql stop
nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf
<edit the max_allowed_packet><Ctrl><X>
service mysql start

You can also exclude the MySQL DB (check the TKLBAM docs for details) if you wish which will at least allow you to get your other data back, but obviously won't solve your issue.