F5 Debugging Chrome Extension

If you've ever troubleshooted APM Portal Access issues, you know how annoying it can be to find the decoded internal url.

This chrome extension seeks to make that quick and easy by showing the decoded information. It will also display the cookies for that site (including the ever-useful MRHSession and LastMRH_Session cookies) and allows you to delete cookies directly from the extension (useful for testing how cookies affect different pages).

Example:

• When accessing a url like https://www.example.com/f5-w-68747470733A2F2F6D79736974652E696E7465726E616C2E6C6F63616C$$/index.html, the extension will be enabled and clicking on the icon will display a popup that show the decoded information (i.e. that the internal url will be https://mysite.internal.local/index.html).
• When accessing a url like https://www.example.com/ that uses an APM access profile and there's an MRHSession cookie, the extension will list the known cookies available for that url.

Installation instructions

As Chrome doesn't really like unpublished extensions, and it's not in the Chrome App Store (yet), you'll have to install the extension in Developer Mode.

Currently, this extension is not in the Chrome App Store, but you can sideload it into Chrome.

• Navigate to chrome://extensions
• Ensure that the Developer mode checkbox is enabled
• Sub-Method 1: Load unpacked extension (prefered)
  • Click the Load unpacked extension button and select the folder that contains the source
• Sub-Method 2: Load the crx file (not always latest version)
  • From the file system, click and drag the .crx file onto the extension page to begin the installation.

Once you have completed the installation, you will notice the icon grayed somewhere beside the address bar. The icon is only enabled on sites whose url address contain f5-w- (denoting an APM encoded url) or where there's an MRHSession cookie.

Version History

• 1.1 - Initial version
  • Includes APM portal access decoded url information
• 1.2 - 2016.04.01
  • Added list of cookies associated with the current site (shows cookie name, domain and value)
• 1.3 - 2016.04.25
  • Added ability to delete cookies from the extension for the site (Known Issue: if you have multiple cookies with the same name that match the page, deleting one will delete all of them)
  • Added decoded BIG-IP persistence cookie value in parenthesis to the list for quicker reference
• 1.4 - 2016.06.30
  • Rebuilt the popup page using AngularJS
  • Introduced (but still disabled) options page and client-side functionality (will need iRules development as well)
• 1.5 - 2016.09.07
  • Enabled the options page again, and finished code to allow the extension to add a header to requests on specific domains (user specified)
• 1.5.1 - 2016.09.18
  • Updated the icon, and removed APM and replaced with debugging icon since this has morphed to APM and LTM usefulness
• 1.6 - 2016.12.19
  • Update icon enabled to include cookies that appear to be encoded persistance cookiess
  • Added link within popup to open session details page on management gui (if enabled in options page)
    • TODO: Add option to enable link only for specific domains (i.e. known internal domains)
• 1.7 - 2017.09.03
  • Added local tracking of sites that appear to use F5 BigIP

Roadmap

• Finish the response header section that should enable the extension (i.e. expected Server header value)
• Introduce forced enabling on user-specified domain
• Add ability to specify the admin url so we can add direct links to specific pages