Please give a test and let me know if it works, thanks.
testing 2.11-r2. So far so good. as per our conversation manually setting DISTCC_DIR fixes distccmon-* so that it displays status. For others who might read: by default DISTCC_DIR is not set, it needs to be set to DISTCC_DIR=/var/tmp/portage/.distcc for distccmon-* to display status info This info is found in the einfo of the ebuild.
works. have a small tool to detect distcc nodes on the local network using zeroconf. Allows for distributed cross compilation - will submit code as a new bug once cleaned up.