Fortunately/Unfortunately I haven't been able to recreate the crash now. I sent my zip log to the info account. Still unable to connect to my other PC. Any more ideas on that?

Alright, I've added the new rule to both machines and still no connections are being made. I also noticed Blender crashing after roughly 30 frames when rendering normally through Cycles. I turned off the CR addon and the crashes went away. When turning off the addon I saw long "traceback" error pop up.

Thanks for the help but still no luck after restarts. Both machines have RTX cards, one 2070S, and one 3080, both are set to use OPTIX. Could this be a firewall or Bitdefender issue? Also, if I turn off the tile size or leave it at zero will each machine render a single frame instead of frame splitting?

@James Crowther Hi James, Has any progress been made in this area? Or is this a feature at this point?( the ability to have each machine render its own frame instead of all machines working on portions of the same frame.) I've run into many situations where the sync time is a huge portion of the overall render time for a frame and having this functionality would greatly speed up the process for rendering whole animations. I saw in another post you referred to this as frame splitting vs. tile splitting. What's the status of this? Thanks for any feedback!