With Joe's help we fixed the failure of princess_sparkle to mount the fb1:/cvs directory when relying on /etc/fstab.

First we changed the mounting options in fstab to the following:

fb1:/cvs        /cvs            nfs     rw,bg,soft        1 1

When we got the following error trying it directly from the command line,

controls@princess_sparkle:~$ sudo mount /cvs
[sudo] password for controls:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on fb1:/cvs,
       missing codepage or helper program, or other error
       (for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
       need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)
       In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
       dmesg | tail  or so

some quick Google searches suggested installing nfs-common, so we tried sudo apt-get install nfs-common and that seemed to do the trick.

CentOS

For the CentOS machines, the following was done:

sudo mkdir /cvs

and then the same mounting configuration was added to /etc/fstab
 

Additionally, all three machines now have a /users symbolic link to /cvs/users