Setting up a drush sql-dump alias
Drush decides whether a site is local or remote via the function drush_is_local_host.  Make up a domain name for your system, such as foo.local, and make an entry for it in /etc/hosts (123.456.78.90 foo.local).  Next, make sure that /etc/hostname also contains foo.local, and confirm this by running hostname -f.  If you do all of this correctly, then you can set 'remote-host' =&gt; 'foo.local', and Drush will still treat it like localhost for commands such as sql-sync.