3 ms·

You can have millions if you manually configure them, the DHCPv6 and SLAAC will not grab several addresses for use.

• cm2187 11y ago
  That's no different from manually configuring non standard ports.
  • brongondwana 11y ago
    No, it's really not. You can ask the OS to allocate a new port when you start up a piece of software and then advertise that port via whatever coordination protocol you have. If you're grabbing an IP address you have to, at least in theory, coordinate with other machines on the network to make sure it's not already taken. It's not the same.
    • toast0 11y ago
      > You can ask the OS to allocate a new port when you start up a piece of software and then advertise that port via whatever coordination protocol you have. As long as the coordination protocol is not output a wrongly formatted url to the terminal and have the user cut and paste it into their browser, the coordination protocol should be able to handle it.
    • cm2187 11y ago
      God knows what the standard will be when we start using IPv6, but I guess a datacentre would allocate each server a prefix of a few thousand ips. The server is then free to use any of them without any risk of collision. The point of this vast address space is precisely to enable the infrastructure to be a lot more stateless (as in not worrying about individual IPs).