One of the modern system administration practices is fully automated OS installs; practically everyone supports it and some OSes even consider it their primary deployment method. I am a lonely holdout, at least for moderate sized environments such as ours where machine (re)installs are not an everyday activity. I have two reasons for this.

The first reason is a pragmatic one. As far as I can tell, it's still generally a fair amount of work to put together a reliable, fully functional auto-install environment that supports a fairly wide variety of machines and software setups. We may be an extreme case; we have at least five different ways to set up Ubuntu 12.04 servers (not counting hardware variations, including whether the system disk is mirrored) and we install machines across multiple networks. With our relatively low rate of (re)installs I can't convince myself that the time savings from having fully automated installs will actually pay off here.

(Note that we already have partially automated installs and even that takes a fair amount of work to assemble for a given LTS release.)

But the bigger reason is a philosophical one. I don't want fully automated installs because I think that they're too dangerous. I consider it a feature that you have to add boot media to a machine and then interact with it several times before the installer will destroy all data on the machine (or at least a disk or two of it) and set it up on our network with some IP address and some software configuration. The idea of 'if this machine PXE boots it will get (re)installed' is, for me, a nightmare. I very much want the chance to double-check what the install process is doing and to interact with it.

So what I really want is not fully automated installs but more smarts in partially automated installs. For example, it would be nice if we could have some high-level options that we could accept or reject, like adding some local standard partitioning schemes. Some of our machines will deviate from them (and I certainly want to see the disks that the install is about to scribble over), but a lot of the time I'd take the 'standard CSLab partitions' option.

(Our current Ubuntu install process basically asks us only for the machine's IP address information and its partitioning, and it's hard to get away from asking for the IP address. No, we don't want to run DHCP on our server networks.)

PS: I want to say that I also want better ways to build, maintain, and update partially automated installs, but I haven't looked at the state of the art in that for a while.

(To be clear: what I'm talking about here is OS installs, where you go from empty disks on a new server to an installed and perhaps somewhat customized OS on the network. There are lots of fairly good solutions for post-install customization and localization.)