The Dialectic Remote Dial Method lets you use one copy of Dialectic to tell another copy of Dialectic elsewhere on your network to dial. Dialectic uses Bonjour to automatically configure the Dialectic clients to talk to one another over the network. For more information, see Dialectic Remote preferences.
Dialectic Remote Dial Method Category. The group of all Dialectic Remote Dial Method configurations.
Dialectic Remote Dial Method Configurations. Configurations allow you to customize the Dialectic Remote Dial Method using different remote machines or settings for different types of calls or locales.
Remote Dial Service. The name of the remote service to use. This pop-up menu will be populated automatically when remote dial services are enabled on remote machines running Dialectic on your network. (See Dialectic Remote preferences for more information).
Password. The password used on the remote machine. The owner of the remote machine must set a password to enable the remote service on his or her machine. The owner must then reveal that password to you in order to use the remote service. This limits unauthorized access to the remote dialing service.
Alert When Services are Found or Removed. If enabled, when remote services become available (or are discontinued), you will receive a notification using either the standard alerts or Growl depending on what you have configured in the Interface preferences. This setting is for all Dialectic Remote configurations, not just the current configuration.
Dialing Rules. This option determines if the call should use the number as transformed on your machine’s Dialing Rules or if the raw number should be transformed using the remote machine’s Dialing Rules.
If you elect to use the rules from this machine, then this machine transforms the phone number and decides what call type it is — but the remote machine decides what call method to use for that call type, and uses it. (This makes sense, because we already know what call method this machine will use: it will use the remote dial service! The remote machine must actually dial, so it gets to pick the call method.)
If you elect to use the rules from the remote machine, then this machine hands the remote machine the original number you asked to dial, and lets the remote machine deal with it just as if you had typed that number for dialing on the remote machine to start with.
Example Usage
We’ve got an iMac and a MacBook Pro on our network and Dialectic is running on both machines. The iMac is connected to our landline using an external USB modem. Our MacBook Pro does not have a modem but there is a phone extension next to the MacBook Pro from the same landline to which the iMac is connected. To dial the landline, we will use the MacBook Pro to contact the iMac using the Dialectic Remote Dial Method. When we dial with the MacBook Pro, it contacts the iMac which in turn is configured to dial using the Modem Dial Method. This then dials our landline and we can pick up the landline extension next to our MacBook Pro to conduct the call.
To set this up:
We configured the Dialing Rules on the iMac to use the Modem Dial Method for all call types. We then entered a name and password for the remote dial service on the iMac and enabled the service. On the MacBook Pro, we created a new Dialectic Remote Dial Method configuration that targets the service running on the iMac and entered the same password we used to enable the service on the iMac. We then set all of the call type Dial Methods for our current Location to use this configuration on our MacBook Pro. Now, when dialing from the MacBook Pro, the number is sent to the iMac which in turn dials the landline using the modem.
