I was running into a problem where uploading attachments to a ticket failed. Instead of getting a warning after waiting for the upload, the page would just refresh and the attachment would not be there.
ERROR: OTRS-CGI-99 Perl: 5.8.8 OS: linux Time: Tue Feb 23 13:46:31 2010
Message: Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes, SQL: 'INSERT INTO web_upload_cache (form_id, filename, content_type, content_size, content, create_time_unix, content_id) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)'
max_allowed_packet = 16M