Ascension 2026 landed on a quiet Thursday, which is the kind of day I use to reset the bench before the next class. I do not rewrite the iOS syllabus that morning. I walk the LAN the same way I ask students to walk it: open the router admin page, confirm the gateway, then try the phone.

The failure mode is almost always the same. A TestFlight build cannot see a local Rails server, someone has flipped the guest SSID, and the reservation list still shows last semester's iPad. The compiler is fine. The path from the device to 192.168.1.1 is not.

I keep a paper card on the power strip with three lines: gateway address, DHCP range, and the hostname I expect the phone to use. If the admin panel will not load, I stop and fix that before I touch Xcode. It is unglamorous, and it saves the hour we used to burn on "the app is broken."

If you only read one newer post on this site, start here, then go back to the older Three20 and Heroku pieces with a working LAN under you.