Hi
is anybody here who controls blender and yafaray from a different PC?
I want to buy a quad core PC just for rendering while I work on my laptop.
With teamviewer or similar VNCs you can access the PC but this goes
over the internet and is not as fast as a direct ethernet connection.
All I want is just to dump the stuff on the PC side and let it run.
I am working on a MacBook and thus also have to gab the difference
between the 2 OSs.
Anybody has some experience?
I’ve run some render jobs through ‘scp’ and ‘ssh’ which also exist in OSX. You could install a minimal Linux without X on the quadcore and manage it remotely with those commands - and of course some Blender commands (see ‘blender -h’) - all within a OSX terminal.
I’ve got nothing to add but a +1. 
You could get all fancy and make a script that runs in daemon mode that automatically starts the render when you drop the .blend into a queue folder that is exported through NFS or whatever OSX uses.
Ssh would be a lot easier though…
Not all VNC’s go out over the internet to connect. I used TightVNC on my home network and just connect directly to the machines by connecting to their IP address. Start the server on the PC and then connect with the client on the MAC. As long as you don’t set up port forwarding for the VNC computer, it will be local addressable only (I think.)
Here’s a little tutorial on how to set up Ubuntu and VNC. At the end of the tutorial it shows on how to connect using Windows, but the same instructions would be valid for a Mac VNC program.
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-use-remote-desktop-in-ubuntu-810-intrepid-ibex.html
yah that is what I started to think as well a direct connection via VNC or a similar thing.
VNC is insanely slow. If you need a remote desktop on a linux machine, use NX.
Teamviewer has the option to manage computer in a local network, i am using it to control my other computer