I feel like this shouldn't be that complicated, but when I Googled the question I found 99 problems, so I thought I would make a post about it.

I am trying to set up a VPN connection to access remote desktops and the web server at my university. I am doing this because I want to be able to use software available through the remote desktops (Photoshop, SPSS, Word, etc.) and access the server where I am working on my lab's website. I can't do this off-campus without using a VPN tunnel.

I set up the connection through Kickoff >> System Settings >> Network Settings >> VPN. This is a PPTP connection with MPPE (Point-to-Point) encryption. Now that I have it set up, I don't know how to access it and make it work.

I installed KVpnc and tried to use that, but it just does this thing where it spends several seconds setting up the connection, then connects and disconnects instantaneously and repeats the whole process again and again.

Background: This is the first time I have attempted to set up a tunnel on any system.

University's VPN Instructions
University's General Connection Instructions

KDE version 4.8.4 (installed on Ubuntu)

Hi,

you don't need Kvpnc for starting your VPN connection. In the network managing widget (plasma-nm) the VPN connection can be choosen as soon as other action are active. I don't really know if kvpnc can access the current kde network vpn settings, but from your description it does. It seems that in this case some is odd with your configuration. Have you check the 'dmesg' command for errors concearning a vpn connection? NetworkManagers error are put there.

Hopefully this was of help. I'm no expert myself but used VPN connections with miy university too - not point-to-point though

You should be able to select the VPN network connection type from the Interfaces side of the Network Management applet, which should make your VPN connection show on the Connections side.

The VPN is now showing up on the Connections side of the Network Managment Applet, but it won't connect.

The command dmesg returned 44 pages of errors.

I'm going to close this thread/question and just use my Windows partition for school, since it doesn't require a VPN to connect to the remote desktops.