[Mediawiki-l] Maintenance problems

[Plamen Gradinarov]

Hello,

However I try to start any file from the maintenance, say, refreshLinks or rebuildSearchIndex, the result is invariably one and the same:
"Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server."

Even the proposed workaround for rebuilding the links is not working. 

First it returns

ERROR 2006: MySQL server has gone away
No connection. Trying to reconnect...
Connection id: xxxxxx
Current DB: XXXX_XX

After about two minutes we have

@foo:=COUNT(*)
397167
1 row in set (2 min 11.91 sec)

After issuing the second command, the server returns:

Query OK, 0 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 0  Warnings: 0

Open any category page, say, http://www.unipedia.info/Category:Computer_science.html
and see

"There are 0 articles in this category."

What am I doing wrong, and why none of the maintenance files is working?
I am using mediawiki 1.3.8

Thank you,
Plamen