Automounting the remote disks with iSynCal
When you need to synchronize your calendars with others located on a network connected computer it's not relevant whether you use your home network, your company's intranet or the Internet, the key point is that you need to mount on the local computer the network disk containing either the remote Home folder or the Calendars folder where the calendar files are located (see calendar files scanning for further informations about the calendar files search process used by iSynCal).
To make iSynCal properly work, you must enable on the remote computer the Apple File Sharing Protocol (open System Preferences, select Sharing and start Personal File Sharing) or another file sharing protocol (Samba, NFS, FTP, DAV) that allows you to remotely mount a network volume, while the local Mac (the one running iSynCal) must connect to the remote one and mount the shared disk or folder containing the calendars to synchronize; you must connect using the same username/password of the user owning the calendars on the remote computer, otherwise the calendar files and the folder where they are stored must have read and write access for all users (see Synchronizing with your iPod or other users on your Mac for further information about the proper permissions settings).
It's usually sufficient to mount the remote computer's startup disk, because it contains all the user's Home folders for that computer; please note that this requires an administrative account on the remote Mac, as it usually happens for the Mac's owner account. Alternatively you can directly mount the Home folder of the user owning the involved calendars using its account while accessing the remote computer; this doesn't require administrative privileges on the remote Mac.
A network disk can even be mounted while iSynCal is running because the path list popup button on the right side is automatically updated every time you click it.
Parameters to mount a network volume
With iSynCal you can easily automate the network disk's mounting/unmounting process by specifying the proper parameters in the AutoMount table, available in each MultiSync document.
Add a new row to the AutoMount table by clicking the cyan "plus" button above it and iSynCal will try to automatically fill the table row's fields retrieving their values from the network volume containing the currently selected Network calendars folder path.
The AutoMount table should have a row for each network volume to mount, where you need to enter the following data:
Type: here you have to specify the file sharing protocol used on the remote computer (server) to share over the network the disk or folder containing the calendars to synchronize. Usually "afp" (the default choice, acronym for Apple File Sharing Protocol) works well because it's the protocol used by Mac OS to delivery the Personal File Sharing service. Alternatively, you may want to select "smb" to mount a folder shared by a computer using the Windows File Sharing protocol (a.k.a. Samba) or "dav" if you want to access via http to a folder located on a web server and shared via the WebDav protocol; in case your web server has SSL enabled, to crypt the data exchanged with its clients, you should select "https". There is also the "ftp" option, but such network volumes can only be mounted in read-only mode due to a limitation in Mac OS X.
Server name or IP address: this is self explanatory. Anyway, since the IP protocol is used, if you want to specify the remote computer's AppleShare/local hostname you must add it the suffix ".local"; you may also use the server's DNS name or its IP address. For example, don't enter "Bob's Computer" here because it won't work, use something like "bobs-computer.local", "bob.domain.com" or "192.168.1.40" instead.
It's also possible to specify a custom port when mounting a network disk, useful when the server hosting the remote calendars is running its service on a non-standard TCP port. For example, if your WebDav server bob.domain.com is running the http service on port 678 instead of the standard http port 80 you should enter bob.domain.com:678 in the AutoMount table's Server column.
Share name: this is the name of the shared volume or folder, usually the volume label or folder name as it is specified on the server.
When mounting a network disk from a WebDav server you should specify here
the full path up to (but not including) the folder containing the remote calendar
files. For example, if one of your calendars is remotely accessible through
WebDav using the URL
http://myserver.domain.com/resources/bob/pda/calendars/work.ics
you should enter /resources/bob/pda in the Share
name column.
User name: type the short username for the account used to mount the network volume. Remember that it must be the short username (on a Mac you can find it in the Accounts panel in System Preferences), so don't use "Bob Smith", use "bsmith" instead.
You don't see a Password column here because, for security reasons, it is not stored inside the MultiSync documents; it can be stored instead in your Keychain by iSynCal. iSynCal will ask you for a password the first time you try to mount a network volume, giving you the option to store it in your Keychain to automatically retrieve it on a subsequent access to that network volume, even from a different MultiSync document.
There are two further columns on the left side of the AutoMount table, Active and Unmount: these options can be used to specify respectively if a volume should be automatically mounted and unmounted before and after all of the current document synchronizations are performed. The Active column is useful when you want to keep some network volumes definitions in a MultiSync document but allow iSynCal to automount them only under certain circumstances. You may instead deactivate the Unmount option if you don't want iSynCal to deactivate the network volume after all synchronizations are performed.
Another useful option available in the AutoMount table is Quit iCal: when this checkbox is enabled iSynCal attempts to quit iCal also on the remote Mac (the one specified in the Server column) by sending it a remote Apple Event. But be careful: iSynCal will send such a remote Apple Event only when running a MultiSync and the remote Mac's connection parameters (server and username) specified into its AutoMount table, thus when you start a synchronization by clicking on the Sync Selected toolbar button you must manually quit iCal on the remote Mac.
However, to allow iSynCal to remotely quit iCal while mounting the network volume you must enable the Remote Apple Events on the remote Mac by opening its System Preferences > Sharing panel.
Remote Apple Events are no longer a great security concern under Mac OS X because username/password authentication is required by the remote system before accepting such events. iSynCal will not ask you again the password of the remote Mac to send it a Remote Apple Event because it will use the same username/password that you had previously entered to mount the network volume.
To properly send a remote Apple Event you must authenticate on the remote Mac using an admin user account, but usually this is not a problem because when you use a Mac for personal use your user account is an admin account. BTW I'll try to explain better how it works by using an example: say you are running iSynCal on Mac A to sync your iCal calendars with Mac B; it doesn't matter if the user running iSynCal on Mac A is an admin account or not, but the username/password you use to connect to Mac B and mount its network volume (and therefore the owner of the calendars on Mac B) must be an admin account on Mac B.
Please note that the actual implementation of the Remote Apple Events service is not able to properly parse the user password when it contains an Unicode decomposable character (accented wowels, umlauts, etc) or the : (colon) character; an alert panel is therefore showed by iSynCal when using a password which contains one or more of the above characters to quit iCal by sending an Apple Event to the remote Mac. In this case you have to change the remote Mac's user password to remotely quit iCal.
Please note that, by default, a non-admin user account can network mount only its Home folder, only the administrators are trusted to perform a network mount of the startup disk or any other whole disk. These settings can be modified on the remote computer by its administrators, either your account could be authenticated and authorized by a computer running Mac OS X Server as part of an Apple Macintosh network, where the access rights management for any network resource is centralized on the server. If you have not a Mac running OS X Server and you wish to manage the access rights for the network resources on a given Mac, you may use the freeware Utility SharePoints, that allows you to add new Mac/Windows shared resources either to modify the access rights for the existing ones.
If you are running Mac OS X Panther from 10.3.0 to 10.3.2 on the Mac that is also running iSynCal, I suggest you to not utilize its Network browsing feature (the Network icon which appears in any Finder window's sidebar, in the File Open/Save panels or when you click the "Search" button in the "Connect to Server" Finder window) because you may experience some problems when trying to access the same volume later. Upgrade Mac OS X to 10.3.3 or later or mount the network volume on your desktop by typing its URL (something like afp://computer_name or afp://computer_ip_address) in the "Server Address" field of the Finder's "Connect to Server" dialog window.
If the remote Home folder is located instead in a unusual place, you can click on the small rounded button with the Users folder icon, located in the Options drawer, to browse the filesystem starting from the network mounted disk icon until you can select the remote Home folder which you were looking for.
Again, take care to mount the remote disk using the same username and password used on the remote computer to locally access both the calendars to be synchronized and the folder where they are stored, otherwise you could not read/write the remote calendar files from the local computer and the synchronization will fail either could not be run at all.
Check that the List calendars found into ... radio buttons are set to Network disks, otherwise the calendars located on the network volumes will not be listed in the right side path selection popup button.
To avoid confusion while identifying the calendars folder, I suggest you to use different names for your local and remote hard disks.
Please note that if you mount at the same time the entire remote hard disk (e.g. Macintosh HD) and your remote Home as a network volume (e.g. JohnDoe) this will deny any access to the remote Home items starting from Macintosh HD (for example, if you try to open Macintosh HD > Users > JohnDoe you will see all the folders inside JohnDoe locked by ... a lock), at least until you unmount the JohnDoe network volume. My suggestion is to mount only one of them.