Can't login to Tomcat 8 manager after multiple troubleshooting steps were made

Question

I'm facing an apparently common issue: I can't manage to login in a recently installed Apache Tomcat 8.

The Tomcat installation is part of a large system comprised of a database and other apps and it's not the first time I've installed it just as it isn't the first time I faced this problem. Being so, I did all the steps that helped me fix the problem the other times based on countless pages I found on the web and here on SO about this problem:

1. Accessed the user XML file and gave all permissions, especially manager-gui, to my created login with no empty spaces between commas
2. Changes in the XML file were proceeded by closing it in Notepad++ to avoid app locking the file
3. Changes in the user XML file were preceded by shutting down the service in Windows Services and turning it up again after changes were made
4. Login and password were set and changed multiple times to be sure it wasn't any kind of mistyped information
5. The access port in server.xml was changed to more than one different option to be sure there wasn't any port conflict with another app (unlikely since the Windows Server running the app is practically clean)
6. The read permissions of the user XML file were checked and are in place.
7. And of course, I reinstalled it at least once.

And maybe more troubleshooting steps I can't remember right now. And none of this worked.

So I'm asking: which other steps could I do to try to access the Tomcat Manager (localhost:port/manager) from a web browser (Chrome/Firefox) from within the same machine it is installed? (no NetBeans involved) I can't think of any other solution.

Answer 1

Well I finally managed to access the manager after appealing to the last resort I had forgot to do: copy and paste of the entire conf folder from a Tomcat which was working to the one having the problem and even so it didn't work by itself, since I still had to change the port from 8080 to 8088 for it to finally work. It seems, therefore, it was a "binary problem": the port wasn't adequate plus differneces in configuration. Comparing the files, I managed to find small differences for example in the web.xml files:

*Current, working*
<mime-mapping>
    <extension>woff</extension>
    <mime-type>application/x-font-woff</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>

*Previously, not working*
<mime-mapping>
    <extension>woff</extension>
    <mime-type>font/woff</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>
<mime-mapping>
    <extension>woff2</extension>
    <mime-type>font/woff2</mime-type>
</mime-mapping>

I can't understand why changes such as this one made any difference, but at least it's working. Thanks for the help.