US Patent 8156199 Centralized control of client-side domain name resolution using VPN services

Techniques for centrally controlling client-side domain name resolution are described. A virtual private network (VPN) client installed on a client device may establish a VPN connection to a load-balancing server that balances load from client devices among a set of data centers that provide a resource. The VPN client may obtain and cache load-balancing information from the load-balancing server. The VPN client may then intercept a Domain Name System (DNS) request to resolve a hostname of a device in the data centers. The VPN client may use the load-balancing information to locally generate a DNS response to the DNS request. In addition, the load-balancing server may cause the VPN client to update its cached list of network addresses when one of the data centers fails.