MySQL Load Balancer Lost connection to MySQL server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 0

Have been working on Load Balancing a couple of MySQL slaves on Rackspace Cloud, had a web load balancer working perfectly but there was a problem with trying to use it with MySQL. I had set up a ServiceNet load balancer as everything would be internal, however it didn’t want to connect giving me the error:

Lost connection to MySQL server at ‘reading initial communication packet’, system error: 0

If I changed the connection string to point to the slaves direct then it would connect fine.

After talking to the very helpful support online the problem is that even by using a custom port it still made me choose a protocol which didn’t contain MySQL. I had jsut left it at HTTP as I thought the port would override this, however I had to set this to POP as it as allows pass through without making packet changes. As soon as I did this it all started working perfectly.