Earlier I posted about how to stop your NetApp Filer from shutting itself down every 24 hours if it had a bad battery. Clearly this isn’t the best solution, it would probably be better to replace the battery completely. Then you get the benefit of battery backed cache if you have the bad luck to lose power.
So to try to fix this situation, I had a really good hunt on the internet for sites selling a battery specific to this model. The best I could find was a company that would sell me a whole new NVRAM IV card for $2500 USD! At least it had a refurbished battery, but it was a little more than I wanted to spend.
I ended up taking the battery to a auto battery shop on a lark and the guy there reckoned he could sort me out. I left the original one with him for around two weeks. He ended up selling me a Sanyo SCB-53P0941 . It cost about $80 bucks. It was a little bit bigger than the original one and wouldn’t fit on the NVRAM IV housing, so I lashed it in place with a cable tie.
As you can see from this horrible photo, I have an old iPhone.
It took about a day to charge up but now it looks like things are good, as you can see by the log below:
netapp*> environment status chassis NVRAM4-battery-7
NVRAM4-battery-7 ok.
netapp*>
The original battery looked like it had a chip in it, so I thought it might need to grafted on to the new battery, but it’s pretty stock. Now you can sleep at night, knowing that you won’t lose any data. Obviously, this is very dodgy and you shouldn’t connect some battery that a random dude in an auto parts store sent you. Our NetApp Filer (FAS960C) is so old that it is out of support, so I had nothing to lose, and the information for a blog post to gain.