What type should I store IP addresses for MySQL?

Question

I was going to use varchar(20), but I was wondering what should if I should do INT and strip off the periods instead. What would be better and why?

Answer 1

store IPV4 as int unsigned

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_inet-aton

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_inet-ntoa