I think the root of the problem is that the /opt/rtapps/ and /cvs/cds/rtapps/ mounting locations point to the same directory on the nfs server. Gautam and I were cleaning up the /cvs/cds/caltech/target/ directory, placing the previous contents of /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxex/, including database files and startup instructions in /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxex_oldVME/, and then moved /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxex2/, which has the channel database and initialization files for the Acromac DAQ, to /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxex/.

This also required updating the systemd entries on c1auxex to point to the changed directory. While confirming that everything worked as before we noticed that upon startup the EPICS IOC complains about not being able to find the caRepeater binary. This was not new and has not limited DAQ functionality in the past, but we wanted to fix this, as it seemed to be some simple PATH issue. While the paths are all correctly defined in the user login shell, systemd runs on a lower level and doesn't know about them. One thing we tried was to let systemd execute /cvs/cds/rtapps/epics-3.14.12.2_long/etc/epics-user-env.sh initializing EPICS. It was strange that the content of that file was pointing to /opt/rtapps/epics-3.14.12.2_long/base, which is not mounted on the slow machines, so we changed the /opt/ it to /cvs/cds/, not realizing that the frontends read from the same directory (as Gautam said, /cvs/cds does not exist as a mount point on the frontend). It ended up not working this way, and apparently I forgot to change it back during clean up. But worse, never elogged it!

In the end, we managed to to give systemd the correct path definitions by explicitly calling them out in /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxex/ETMXenv, to which a reference was added in the systemd service file. The caRepeater warning no longer appears.