The stored environment is loaded during the restart of the MacroServer. The file name is specified as the EnvironmentDb property of the MacroServer. The contents can be inspected by:
import shelve e = shelve.open('/online_dir/MacroServer/macroserver.properties') print e
Notice that the file /online_dir/SardanaConfig.py provides some defaults. It is executed at the end of SardanaStartup.py (which is called from SardanaAIO.py) See 10.1.1.