Where I currently work I do the following automatically for both windows and UNIX. Install, configure, start and stop services, run tests, log results to a DB, and email out status messages. Building is out of my hands but anything else I can automate. Most of this is done via perl with some shell scripts and java that other people wrote. This has saved huge amounts of time and effort. PLus now we get to do cool stuff rather than all that boring stuff. :-)