New Install "MYSql Server Has Gone Away"

Question

Good evening, I'm new here and trying to get CiviCRM installed for the first time (volunteer sysadmin for a non-profit).

I think I have gone through all of the steps to troubleshoot but I suspect I am missing something.

Relevant Versions:

• CiviCRM - 5.27.3
• WordPress - 5.4.2 (Multi-Site enabled but only primary site exists)
• Azure MySQL instance - 5.7.29-log
• Linux (Separate from MySQL) - "Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS"
• PHP - PHP 7.2.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.6 (cli) (built: May 26 2020 13:09:11) ( NTS )
• NGINX - nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)

Attempted adjustments:

1. Initially ran into SSL issues (Had MySQL set to SSL Enforce) Found some requests to adjust CiviCRM to accommodate this but in the meantime turned off enforcement to try and get the install to work. (This got me to the error below, all other changes listed have had no impact)
2. Ran as admin user
3. Updated MySQL config options (Timeouts, Innodb, max sizes, etc.)
4. Updated php.ini settings (timeouts, reconnect, etc.)
5. Repaired/Optimized Wordpress DB
6. Manually ran in civicrm.mysql to create tables
7. Followed XKCD Flowchart (https://xkcd.com/627/) regarding "MySQL Server has gone away"
8. Searched for install logs to try and find what was causing the error (failed to locate)
9. Ended up here, the results from the check seem to contradict (connection works well for all things EXCEPT knowing if the server is there)

Thanks for any ideas/direction.

Answer 1

+1 for the xkcd reference.

There's some work being done on SSL but for the "server exists" error this is a known issue for azure. See https://lab.civicrm.org/dev/core/-/issues/1206

Briefly, just comment out the body of the check it mentions and instead make it always return TRUE: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/blob/5.16.2/install/index.php#L1036