Turns out the Raspberry Pi makes an excellent printer server using CUPS! The printer is a HP Deskjet F4180 that will be shared using IPP on a local network. Even on the RPi I still prefer to use Archlinux. It gives me a minimalistic install that's not too bloated.
Installing CUPS and the essentials:
% pacman -S cups ghostscript gsfontsBefore starting up CUPS we make sure we can access the web interface from within the local network. Open up the file /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and make sure the Listen-directive is assigned to the local IP-adress. There's also a couple of <Location>-directives that needs to allow access from the local network. I allowed local access to the / and /admin routes so that I could access and configure the printer from the web interface within the local network.
At first I tried to set up the printer directly in CUPS, unfortunately this didn't work. Turns out I needed to install a package from the official repositories and use HPs tool to set up the printer.
% pacman -S hplip
% hp-setup -iAfter running the hp-setup program I printed a test page and everything was working just fine! Heading back to the CUPS interface I didn't have to do anything else, everything was in order and the printer was ready to be used. The client machines used for printing run Windows which has support for IPP since Windows 2000. Just add a new printer, select the Network option and chose to enter the path yourself under Select a shared printer by name. It can be found if you browse the CUPS interface and it should look something like this:
http://host_ip_address:631/printers/printer_nameAssuming you did not skip out on the configuration of CUPS the printer should now be ready for use.