Accessing the UMKC VPN on Linux
The UMKC network uses the proprietary Microsoft PPTP VPN protocol. This protocol can however, be accessed from a linux machine. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use the PPTPClient suite of applications available for Linux.
pptpclient can be found at their official website. Alternatively, there may be packages available for your Linux distribution of choice. I use Fedora, and I found packages available at here.
Once you have pptpclient suite installed, you will need to run pptpconfig. I did so by switching to the root user and just typing in the comand pptpconfig.
At that point, you will be greeted by the following screen: 
I have included a README file with the network information required to establish a proper VPN connection to the UMKC network. So you can start by inputting the information as below: 
When you install the UMKC VPN package, it also installs a script which setups the routing information for VPN once connected. pptpconfig can also do this for you, but you need to tell it the routes to direct to the VPN connection. In the 'Routing' tab, click the Edit Network Routes... button and add the information as follows: 
UMKC uses a few server's for most functionality, some of these function a semi-redundant DNS servers. You may want to add them in: 
Once all the information is in place, hit the Add button, or the Update button if you have already added the connection, was just editing the settings. To start the connection, click/highlight it in the list of tunnels (in the listbox) and hit the Start... button. A window should popup as follows, detailing the connection, and informing you its the success: 
That is it! Assuming all went well, you are now tunneled into the UMKC internal network. Standard rules apply as when you are physically on campus.
Notes:
- adding the routes is not strictly neccessary, however, you lose most of the functionality required to make use of the VPN, this is also true for the DNS
- if you intend to mount any smb shares available on the campus network, you will need to utilize the WINS servers, their IPs are in the README