Patent ID: 7930365

Claim:
A method of offloading Uniform Resource Locator (URL) mangling, the method comprising the steps of: a gateway server receiving a first Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request that indicates a first URL of a file that is stored by a first HTTP server, wherein the file contains a second URL that cannot be resolved by domain name servers that are outside of a virtual private network (VPN) that contains the first HTTP server; the gateway server generating a second HTTP request to the first HTTP server, wherein the second HTTP request requests the file from the first HTTP server, wherein the second HTTP request contains a first directive that (a) indicates that the first HTTP server should modify URLs in the file, and (b) indicates a URL of a gateway server for the VPN; the gateway server sending the second HTTP request toward the first HTTP server; the gateway server receiving an HTTP response that contains the file, in which the second URL has been modified so that the URL of the gateway server precedes information that was previously contained in the second URL; the gateway server determining that the HTTP response contains a second directive that indicates that URLs in the file have been modified; in response to determining that the HTTP response contains the second directive, the gateway server removing the second directive from the HTTP response; and after removing the second directive from the HTTP response, the gateway server sending the HTTP response toward a client from which the first HTTP request originated; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.