Automatic Network Configuration

[Corona688]

I don't mean DHCP, I mean the ability to gracefully pull needed configuration data for network services instead of duplicating it in multiple files. For instance, I would like to be able to tell squid to listen on the LAN device instead of telling it to listen on a specific IP, and tell firehol to redirect incoming HTTP requests for a specific interface, instead of a specific address, so that I can just edit /etc/conf.d/net instead of 9 seperate files.

firehol will be the easiest since its configuration file can execute full-blown BASH statements; I can abuse the ifconfig and sed commands to extract networking data and feed it where needed. I've also resorted to a 'preconf' service that generates configuration files from templates before. Both of these are ugly as sin.

So, my questions are as follows:

• Is there a better way to get IP addresses, etc. into shell variables than ifconfig interface | sed s/eyeblinding/regex/omgwtfbbq ?
  
• Is there a general-purpose way to configure network services for specific interfaces rather than addresses?

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