You may set up clients to either netboot from the master (connected nodes) or have them either self-hosted or netboot from some other pxe host (disconnected nodes). In all cases they set themselves up at boot-time to prepare to build packages.

The cluster master rsyncs the interesting data (ports and src trees, bindist tarballs, scripts, etc.) to disconnected nodes during the node-setup phase. Then, the disconnected portbuild directory is nullfs-mounted for jail builds.

The portbuild user can ssh(1) to the client nodes to monitor them. Use sudo and check the portbuild.hostname.conf for the user and access details.

The scripts/allgohans script can be used to run a command on all of the ${arch} clients.