OK, I've added 192.168.1.1 tower line to my windows host file. It immediately enabled me open the server GUI by typing tower/ at the address bar of my browser.
The folder and files weren't accessible as before, so i've deleted all credentials associated with the tower and tower ip address, rebooted the PC and everything is back to normal, everything looks fine. Great - thanks for you all. However. I believe i still have an inherent problem:
pinging tower works now fine
pinging i.dont.exist tries to ping that weird ip address, [173.45.161.113], outside my network.
Any ideas?