CUPS VS pfSense

If your printer for example supports IPP and Postscript or PDF then that would be possible. Higher end (commercial) HP printers usually offer this functionality. Take a look at CUPS [1] if you want to know more about IPP.

[1] https://www.cups.org/

Your best bet is to set up a print server. The support page even has a CUPS driver. CUPS is well known for supporting a lot of printers. I run it on an old Mac-mini running Ubuntu. You can run it on something as small as a Raspberry Pi.

Apple should be more open about their removals. It isn't clear how this affects their CUPS implementation or PostScript printers https://www.cups.org

CUPS is under the Apache License 2.0 , so they can just use it, if they wanted: https://github.com/apple/cups/blob/master/LICENSE

They won't of course.

CUPS printing server

Another alternative is for you to set up a print server in VLAN20. Then set up the print server to print to the printer in VLAN99. CUPS is pretty easy to set up.

But after both Apple and Linux switched their CUPS-based printing systems to Python 3 or some other breaking change that I don't mind to understand, the only way to print a document seemed to be using a PC running Microsoft Windows. So I had to save a PDF in the cloud or email it to myself, then startup Windows on a laptop physically connected to the printer, start the printing process, check if the paper has been printed successfully, and shut down Windows. What a waste of time and energy!

Another option is to set up a print server. There are free print server programs that you can run on a computer. CUPS is pretty popular. I used to run it on a Raspberry Pi for an ancient LaserJet 1012. That printer just keeps going.

One option is Firewalla Gold Plus, or you could buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself.

Download and install pfsense as a virtual machine or partition: https://www.pfsense.org Configure it with the rules you want: https://youtu.be/VAGFGppSt74 Play with it, but be careful because it will block all traffic unless you check everything properly.

Another option is Firewalla, or buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself. Two similar concepts, with the cost being either money or your DIY time. A lot of Firewalla users say that it's much easier for home use than pfSense/OPNsense, so you might find it worthwhile to spend a little more on it upfront and have to tinker less.

If you want firewall, I think you can use https://www.pfsense.org/ or https://opnsense.org/ , maybe running on an old PC or a Raspberry Pi. Not sure.

I've recently started using OPNsense. It's similar to pfSense, but seems to be considered a little more user-friendly.

For most router issues, I recommend people always put them in to dumb bridge mode and put a proper firewall like pfsense or opnsense as your gateway.

I have found that my historical average packet loss is about 0.02%. Something distinctly changed around 4/20 of this year, and now the average packet loss has gone up to 0.05% with spikes even higher, associated with periods of elevated ping times. It rarely did that before. Typically the IPv6 stack has more problems than v4 (especially an incident of packet loss on 4/28), and neither has been trouble-free since I started service in early 2020. My data comes from a pfSense installation.

I have done this using the Pfsense