I have to add that RhodiumToad is a class act on IRC, and an SQL wizard. I was using the ip4r datatype for something really annoying at work, and eventually needed some hairy SQL. He steered me away from recursive queries into window functions, and wrote a correct query to solve my problem (basically normalizing overlapping IP ranges and some associated metadata with each range) in less than 30 minutes.
I really couldn't say how much time and money he saved me, but it was a lot.
Joe, this is definitely an awesome datatype, what is painful is building it typically or at least it was years ago when I dealt with it. I'm sure it's gotten better but still, I'd love to see this packaged up as a contrib just like hstore.
If you run Debian (or a derivate) you can download it using apt-get from apt.postgresql.org, and then just run "CREATE EXTENSION ip4r;" to install it into a specific database.
(https://github.com/RhodiumToad/ip4r-historical/blob/master/R...)