Tomcat: Communication link failure: EOFException
 

m running tomcat 6.0.13 on a redhat 4.1.1 and I'm seeing this all too often in the catalina.out log:

java.sql.SQLException: Communication link failure: java.io.EOFException, underlying cause: null
** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
java.io.EOFException
STACKTRACE:
java.io.EOFException
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readFully(MysqlIO.java:1395)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.reuseAndReadPacket(MysqlIO.java:1539)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.checkErrorPacket(MysqlIO.java:1930)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sendCommand(MysqlIO.java:1168)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sqlQueryDirect(MysqlIO.java:1279)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.execSQL(Connection.java:2281)
at com.mysql.jdbc.PreparedStatement.executeQuery(PreparedStatement.java:1634)
at com.uploadtracker.frontend.UPTRADRIVER.getSLAVESTATUS(UPTRADRIVER.java:218)
at com.uploadtracker.frontend.UPTRADRIVER.getTrack(UPTRADRIVER.java:202)
etc....

I've searched many forums/mail lists and cannot come up with a fix.
Any ideas as to what's causing this? Could it be a dodgy network or mishandling of connections? Would setting "autoReconnect" and/or "autoReconnectForPools" options to true in the connection strings help?
This doesn't actually cause any crashes, but its still a mystery to me.