Oct 2023 was the month I finally named every reservation on the teaching LAN instead of trusting "iPhone" in the DHCP table. Two devices had the same default hostname. One of them was the phone we used for TestFlight. The other was a leftover from a demo.

Labeling the leases did more for class time than another slide on NSURLSession. Once the reservation said "lab-phone-red" and pointed at a stable address, the local API stopped looking haunted. Students could read the table and tell which device owned which lease.

I still do this before I talk about certificates or App Transport Security. If the router cannot tell the phones apart, the rest of the stack is guessing. The older posts on this blog assume a network that already behaves. This one is the missing preface.