Net render is a client server based piece of software.
The server sets up the project file to be rendered. It allows you to change all the settings and render output from the netserver. You then save those settings as a file to be rendered. Each one of the computers that will be rendering the animation will be the client and they will run netslave and rendermessenger. They are connected to the server via these pieces of software. From that point you drop a net salve into the rendering project from the pool of computers listed in netserver. Each frame is rendered my a individual computer in the pool. Once it completes the frame it goes to the net server and asked for the next frame to be rendered. This continues until the animation is completed. I still get a kick out of all the machines rendering at the same time.
I would like it to upgraded to take advantage of multi core systems, but it would take a rewrite to recognize each core of the slave machine. Right now net salve recognizes the ip address of the slave machine as only one cpu.
Anyway it is a cool piece of software!
Steve