Just recently I was looking for a method of rendering an animation using a network of three computers I have at home.  During my search I looked at DrQueue, Farmer Joe, Yadra as well as individual scripts that people had written.  I then stumbled on this method of using Blender and nothing else, so I thought I would share it as it worked perfectly for me.

IMPORTANT:  Prepare your source .blend file by packing it so that all referenced texture images are included. 

1. Decide on a master computer to host the source .blend file and set up a folder for the rendered images of your animation.
2. On the slave computers map to the network drive on the master computer that has the folder containing the source .blend file and render output folder (follow these instructions if you don’t know how to map a network drive - Mapping a Network Drive
3. Run Blender on all your networked computers.
4. On the master computer open the .blend file containing your animation.
5. On your slave computers navigate over the mapped drive to the source .blend file on the master computer and open it.
6. Important:  Make sure that on all the computers you have “Touch” and “No Overwrite” buttons active on the “Output” tab (F10 – See picture above)   

Now all you have to do is start rendering your animation on ALL your networked computers.  With this set up all the computers work together by picking the next frame to be rendered as the previous one is finished without any overwriting of an already completed frame.  It doesn’t matter what the speed is of each of your computers, each computer simply starts the next frame that needs to be rendered after it has finished with the current one.  For example on the three computers I connected with this method my fastest computer renders 4 frames for every 2 of the next fastest , and every 1 frame of the slowest. 

Hope you find this useful.

Thanks for the details.   I'll have to try this out.   Where did you come up with this info?

This post on BlenderArtists pointed me in the right direction.

Distributed Rendering over a local network

I won't say that I completely understand this method, but isn't it possible for more than one computer to render the same frame even if 'No Overwrite' is selected?

DramaKing,  you may be right.  I'm a bit like you in that I don't understand 100% the how and why of this method I'm just glad that it works.

I tried it.  It seems to work well.  You can start or stop computers at anytime and they just pick up with the next frame.

The external LuxRender system supports multiple computers contributing to a single frame over a network.