When I run distccmon-text 1 it creates a new empty line one time per second even though I (should) have one distcc daemon up and running.
Is it possible to list the host nodes in my ~/.distcc/hosts which are up and running, ready to work?
It depends on where your distcc directory is. If it's not in ~/.distcc you have to declare DISTCC_DIR beforehand:
DISTCC_DIR=/some/where/over/the/rainbow distccmon-text
Also if the client isn't sending out requests to servers, you won't see any output.