Can anyone tell me if this is the correct way to increase the max number of connections, or how to do it if it's not? I would try to test it myself, but it is a bit hard to do on a busy server and when I would need a huge number of connections.
Back in the olden-days (1999) on Solaris boxes, a company I was working at ran into a problem where MySQL hit the maximum number of possible socket descriptors compiled into the kernel, so couldn't get a pipe from the webserver to the DB.
Probably not your problem, but keep an eye out for gotchas in the environment too.
-- Ward