iChat :: Automatically Accept Incoming Calls
Posted: June 26, 2006

Let's just say that you are off on a business trip for two weeks. About a week into the trip, you feel the urge to check in with your office. Not just for e-mail and voicemail, but you actually want to SEE your office. Lucky for you, you have another Mac on your desk at the office with an iSight.

So what you want to do, essentially, is to connect to your office Mac via iChat (there are other options, but hey... it's free!) and begin a video conference. The only problem with this scenario is that when you attempt to initiate a video chat with your office Mac, it will require someone to be there to accept the call, right? Nope.

In order for to set your office Mac to automatically accept incoming calls, you need to do the following:

1) Quit iChat (be sure to Quit the app, not just close it)
2) Open Terminal (Applications | Utilities) and run the following two commands individually (pressing return after each):

defaults write com.apple.ichat AutoAcceptVCInvitations 1
defaults write com.apple.ichat AutoAcceptACInvitations 1

The first command enables your office Mac to automatically accept calls for video. The second, for audio.

Now, you need to re-open iChat, and make sure you log in. Your office Mac will now automatically accept calls from anyone who attempts to call that account.

If you want to reverse this change, perform the same steps as above, only change the "1" to a "0" for each of the Terminal commands.