IP address datatype - any ideas or pointers?

Hi All, I'm just starting on a database to track IP addresses. I'm thinking about how best to store the IP address - 4 tinyints, varchar or char; as one big varchar or 4 chunks? We will eventually want to look at things by net or subnet and being able to search on the various parts of the address would be useful I suppose and I clearly need to spot user error like a value over 255. Is there anything out there that I might use or at least look at for ideas? Thanks Frank frank@declan.com