Theoretical Question about Addressing

[RageAx]

Could you theoretically connect  65.535 (255.255) devices on your home subnet network if you configured your router to have a subnet mask of /16 (255.255.0.0) and if not, why is this not possible?

And if it is possible, to where could you stretch this limit.

Thanks for your answers.  

[Skiiwee29]

Yes you can. Is it practical? No... but you can if you have the bandwidth and equipment to support that many devices... Like you would need hundreds of switches to run the thousands of Access Points necessary for the wifi portion alone so you dont choke things out with the wifi connection... 

[Lurick]

No, you can connect 65534 devices on a /16 since you have the broadcast and network address reserved.

You can connect upwards of 2.1-ish billion IPv4 devices to a single subnet if you were crazy enough to do so with a /1 subnet. I'm not going to get into the logistical nightmare of trying to deal with all those connections leaving a network and the monstrosity of equipment you would need to deal with it all.

[Levisallanon]

1 hour ago, Lurick said:

No, you can connect 65534 devices on a /16 since you have the broadcast and network address reserved.

You can connect upwards of 2.1-ish billion IPv4 devices to a single subnet if you were crazy enough to do so with a /1 subnet. I'm not going to get into the logistical nightmare of trying to deal with all those connections leaving a network and the monstrosity of equipment you would need to deal with it all.

And if you'd go with an internal ipv6 network instead of ipv4 you could go even further. But I'm not 100% sure yet if you could go without ipv4 completely already. You could also use double NAT in your own network to increase the size even more if you want.

[RageAx]

Linus should test this  It would be an entertaining video, trying to connect as many devices as humanly possible to his network ^^ 

[Levisallanon]

11 minutes ago, RageAx said:

Linus should test this  It would be an entertaining video, trying to connect as many devices as humanly possible to his network ^^ 

There is nothing really special about.
It's kind of how the internet was created. And because at one point we reached the limit we never expected to reach we now have to get everyone to use ipv6 because we don't expect to reach that limit (which would be a very awesome achievement because we would at least need to colonize some other planets to reach it probably).

[Lurick]

4 hours ago, RageAx said:

Linus should test this  It would be an entertaining video, trying to connect as many devices as humanly possible to his network ^^ 

I can do that with Spirent test tools.

I've currently got 150K IPv4 hosts and a bunch of IPv6 hosts sitting on a network right now with traffic going between them to stress the network. I need to triple the IPv4 host scale to around 500K hosts shortly but that's a tomorrow thing.