IP addresses

I am planning on doing a LOT of work with ip addresses and thought that the inet data type would be a great place to start.

 

But I'm not sure how this works in with accessing the addresses.  In perl or ruby how is the value returned?

Or should I stricly use host() and other functions to be explicit about what I'm doing.

 

 

Another question.

Given a subnet (eg: 192.168.1.0/24) is there some way to pull all the addresses therein?

I can do this in code - but I was curious if there was a postgres way of doing it (didn't see any, but..)