FreeIPA VS CUPS

I also want to try FreeIPA but as it's built on top of 389ds I'm afraid that it's gonna be as big of a memory hog (will try it later anyways) and has many things I don't and won't need, which I'm afraid would add complexity to setup.

FreeIPA server and replicas

A good place to start might be FreeIPA.

FreeIPA1 is not written in PHP. I believe you are confusing it with another project, maybe FreePBX which is written in PHP?

I had Fedora 34 installed to an SD card for a FreeIPA node which worked well. It was most likely an earlier release (32 or 33) running on a Pi 3B which would occasionally run out of memory, so the whole thing got transplanted to a Pi 4 with 4GB. I'm pretty sure I used the disk image to install since I like to start from a minimal image and only install what I need.

Take a look at FreeIPA

https://www.freeipa.org/page/Main_Page and https://github.com/freeipa/freeipa/tree/master/doc/workshop

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.