11.3 Charting A Budget

[Mario Roby]

TheIndian union government announced its national budget for the upcoming financial year 2023-24 which is the last budget placed by the current government in the Parliament before the next general elections in India in 2024. The budget allocates around INR 1.13 trillion (11.3 billion) in national-level education spending, covering school and higher education. Meanwhile the technical and vocational education sector has been allocated a budget of around 352 million.

The overall vision of the budget is to have a technology-driven and knowledge-based economy with strong public finances, and a robust financial sector. The government aims to achieve this through creating opportunities and fulfilling the aspirations of citizens, especially young people; providing a strong impetus for growth and job creation; spurring green growth; and strengthening macro-economic stability.

Within the overarching vision of the budget, the national education outlay has been increased by 13 per cent from the previous year, with school education having a significant increase of 16.5 per cent and higher education by 8 per cent.

The education programme outlay and the priorities announced in the budget demonstrate the intention of the national government to build on the reforms it started rolling out in line with the National Education Policy 2020 and bring about improved synergy in interventions and efficiency in implementation for better learning outcomes. By March 2022, the student enrolment in higher education has increased from 39 million to 41 million, and the number of higher education institutions (HEI) has increased to 1,113 universities, 648 medical colleges and 23 Indian Institutes of Technology.

Reforms in the education sector are expected to continue to progress, with the additional renewed focus laid out by the government on reading skills for students, teacher development, research and development in niche areas through this budget. The budget also provides further impetus for skills development to accelerate progress in meeting the objectives of the flagship Skill India initiative launched by this government in 2015.

Sandeepa manages production and delivery of country insight and market intelligence from South Asia including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for the UK education institutions to access opportunities for partnership and mobility.

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The FreeNAS User Guide is a work in progress and relies on thecontributions of many individuals. If you are interested in helping usto improve the Guide, read the instructions in the README.IRC Freenode users are welcome to join the #freenas channelwhere you will find other FreeNAS users.

The FreeNAS User Guide is freely available for sharing andredistribution under the terms of theCreative Commons AttributionLicense.This means that you have permission to copy, distribute, translate,and adapt the work as long as you attribute iXsystems as the originalsource of the Guide.

FreeNAS is an embedded open source network-attached storage (NAS)operating system based on FreeBSD and released under a2-clause BSD license.A NAS has an operating system optimized for file storage and sharing.

FreeNAS provides a browser-based, graphical configuration interface.The built-in networking protocols provide storage access to multipleoperating systems. A plugin system is provided for extending thebuilt-in features by installing additional software.

FreeNAS 11.3 is a feature release, which includes newsignificant features, many improvements and bug fixes to existingfeatures, and version updates to the operating system, baseapplications, and drivers. Users are encouraged to Update tothis release in order to take advantage of these improvements and bugfixes.

Network interface management has beenredesigned to streamline management of both physical and virtualinterfaces using one screen. VLANs and LAGGs are now classified asinterface types and support for the Bridge interfacetype has been added. The addressing details for all physicalinterfaces, including DHCP, are now displayed but are read-only if theinterface is a member of a LAGG. When applying interface changes, theweb interface provides a window to cancel the change and revert to theprevious network configuration. A new MTU field makes it easier to setthe MTU as it no longer has to be typed in as an Auxiliary Parameter.

Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME)support has been added. ACME simplifies the process of issuing andrenewing certificates using a set of DNS challenges to verify a useris the owner of the domain. While the new API supports the addition ofmultiple DNS authenticators, support forAmazon Route 53has been added as the initial implementation. The ACME DNSscreen is used for authenticator configuration which adds theACME Certificates option for Certificate Signing Requests. Onceconfigured, FreeNAS will automatically renew ACME certificates as theyexpire.

Reporting has been greatly improved. Data is now prepared onthe backend by the middleware and operating system. Any remaining datamanipulation is done in a web worker, keeping expensive processing offof the main UI thread/context. The SVG-based charting library wasreplaced with a GPU-accelerated canvas-based library. Virtual scrolland lazy loading prevent overloading the browser and eliminate theneed for a pager. Users can zoom by X or Y axis and reset the zoomlevel with a double click. Graphs do not display if there is norelated data. Support for UPS and NFS statistics has been added.

The web interface has received many improvements and bug fixes. Usabilityenhancements include: ability to move, pin, and copy help text,persistent layout customizations, customizable column views, sizeunits which accept humanized input, improved caching and browsersupport, and improved error messages, popup dialogs, and help text. AniX Official theme has been added which is the default for newinstallations.

NAT support has been added as the default for most Plugins.With NAT, a plugin is contained in its own network and does notrequire any knowledge of the physical network to work properly. Thisremoves the need to manually configure IP addresses or have a DHCPserver running. When installing a plugin into a virtualizedenvironment, NAT removes the requirement to enable Promiscuous Modefor the network.

The Plugins page has been streamlined so that most operationscan be performed without having to go to the Jails page.Support for collections has been added to differentiate betweeniXsystems plugins, which receive updates every few weeks, andCommunity plugins. In addition, there have been many bug fixes andimprovements to iocage, the Plugins backend, resulting in a muchbetter Plugins user experience.

There have been several Pool Manager improvements. Thelabels and tooltips for encryption operations are clearer. Disk type,rotation rate, and manufacturer information makes it easier todifferentiate between selectable disks when creating a pool. AREPEAT button makes it easy to create large pools usingthe same vdev layout, such as a series of striped mirrors.

U1 is the first maintenance release to 11.3-RELEASE, including nearlyone hundred bug fixes and other improvements. For a detailed changelist, see the completed tickets in theFreeNAS/TrueNAS Jira Project.

iXsystems is pleased to announce the general availability of the fifth update to FreeNAS version 11.3!11.3-U5 is a maintenance release that has over 100 bug fixes to the Middleware and Web Interface.This is now the most stable and performant release of FreeNAS 11.3, and users are encouraged to update immediately!Here is the full changelog for FreeNAS 11.3-U5:

Due to numerous improvements in the replication engine and ZFS, FreeNAS/TrueNAS 11.3 will no longer replicate to FreeNAS/TrueNAS 9.10 systems (or earlier).Solution: update the destination system to FreeNAS/TrueNAS 11.3 or newer.

Names of files, directories, and devices are subject to some limitsimposed by the FreeBSD operating system. The limits shown here are fornames using plain-text characters that each occupy one byte of space.Some UTF-8 characters take more than a single byte of space, and usingthose characters reduces these limits proportionally. System overheadcan also reduce the length of these limits by one or more bytes.

Tables show a subset of all available columns. Additional columns canbe shown or hidden with the COLUMNS button. Set acheckmark by the fields to be shown in the table. Column settings areremembered from session to session.

These fields accept standard cron values. The simplest optionis to enter a single number in the field. The task runs when the timevalue matches that number. For example, entering 10 meansthat the job runs when the time is ten minutes past the hour.

The Days of Week schedules the task to run on specific days.This is in addition to any listed Days. For example,entering 1 in Days and setting W forDays of Week creates a schedule that starts a task on thefirst day of the month and every Wednesday of the month.

Scrub Tasks can have a number of Threshold days set.The configured scrub task continues to follow the displayed calendarschedule, but it does not run until the configured number of thresholddays have elapsed.

It is important to use the web interface or the Console Setup menu for allconfiguration changes. FreeNAS stores configuration settings in adatabase. Commands entered at the command linedo not modify the settings database. This means that changes madeat the command line will be lost after a restart and overwritten bythe values in the settings database.

Most fields and settings in the web interface have a (Help Text) icon.Additional information about the field or setting can be shown byclicking (Help Text). The help text window can be dragged to anylocation, and will remain there until (Close) or (Help Text) isclicked to close the window.

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