I was asked today to confirm the operation of INET_ATON() and INET_NTOA() functions for converting IP4 strings to numeric representations. My tests on the machine I was just connected to at the very instant reported the following results.

mysql> SELECT VERSION();
+-----------------+
| VERSION()       |
+-----------------+
| 5.1.31-1ubuntu2 |
+-----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT INET_ATON('74.165.97.204') AS ipn;
+------------+
| ipn        |
+------------+
| 1252352460 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT INET_NTOA(1252352460) as ipa;
+---------------+
| ipa           |
+---------------+
| 74.165.97.204 |
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

The results on the client via ODBC using MySQL 5.0.45 was?

ipn
1252352460

ipa
37342E3136352E39372E323034

What is causing this? It was