The Internet is becoming extremely complex. Meanwhile, the network devices have been supporting more functions and services, which result in much more misconfigurations. Such misconfigurations, however, have become the main reason for network interruption as well as network anomalies. This issue has drawn many researchers' interest and attention, thus becomes a significant research topic in the field of network management. Since 2002, researchers have devoted themselves to solve configuration problems from different perspectives, and these studies greatly contribute to the development of the Internet automatic configuration. This paper firstly presents Internet automatic configuration and some configuration cases; then categorizes and evaluates Internet automatic configuration from the aspects of automatic configuration generation, configuration validation and automatic configuration realization; last but not least, summarizes the defects in the current research and then prospect the development of future research. The purpose of this paper is to provide some available information and beneficial enlightenment for researchers of this field.