packer-plugin-arm-image VS CUPS

Packer is a tool that can be used to build machine images. Basically, it takes a base image, runs a series of steps to provision that image, and then burns a new image. In my workplace we use it heavily to build AWS AMIs. But it has an ARM plugin that looks to be very very suitable for building customised Raspberry Pi images (my quick read of the doco there says it can go ahead and write the final image to an SD card for you too).

At that point, I decided to use packer-plugin-arm-image instead. The setup did not work out of the box, but after a simple PR, it built my first empty image and proved it's possible to build an ARM image locally.

Packer builder for arm worked really well for that but requires chroot. https://github.com/solo-io/packer-builder-arm-image

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.