Not realizing initial posts are moderated, I stared at the problem a lot longer and realized that something was swapping the C and D bytes of the IPV4 address. The actual address is 192.168.1.44, not 192.168.44.1.
I’m not sure if that swapping is in the server responding to the connect request or in the NM instance requesting the connection. I did not create the connection manually, so suspect there’s some minor bug somewhere, but wasn’t sure if I should report it.
Thank you for responding. Please advise if I should create a bug report.