@EuphoricHacker oh wow I completely missed the part about tcpdump. Sorry about that. I saw the item about dig and host but not tcpdump. I apologize if I came off as condescending. What do you think...

@EuphoricHacker well you seem to have clued in on something but I'm a little lost on how you tested with dig and host. You mentioned, for example, there's ~3-4 second delay before the client receives...

@EuphoricHacker @EuphoricHacker I suppose one thing to consider is that DNS lookups are not tcp, but udp. It's supposed to fall back to tcp, but may not be in your case... UDP never acknowledges...

@EuphoricHacker it may be distasteful, but have to set a different DNS server manually on your Mac to rule out your NAS DNS service? Also, do you have a windows machine to rule out the Mac?

First, your NAS is running DNS? Second, have you run a long ping test from the M1 to your NAS? What’s the response time?