Hey,
when IPFire 2.13 was released, the latest version of strongswan was shipped with it. Apparently, some people have problems operating their VPN connections with it.
This is a brief summary from my point of view:
The first version with these changes that might cause trouble has been released in August 2012 with a big headline which said: Testers needed.
* http://planet.ipfire.org/post/testers-needed-strongswan-5-0-0 * http://lists.ipfire.org/pipermail/development/2012-August/000039.html
My mail on the mailing list states:
It should not require any manual interaction at all. Please install and give me feedback about the connection stability and the interoperability with other (proprietary) implementations.
It's as if someone had known...
If you think, we didn't have people who actually tested this, you are wrong. There were a lot of people and the reports I got of them were all like: "Yeah, this made my VPN tunnels more stable". Especially when the configuration of one connection has been edited, the other connections remained established all the time. A big advantage over the implementation in IPFire 2.11!
Eight days before the final version of IPFire 2.13 was released, people started complaining. It was not a real bug report, but just a shout out "something went wrong, I could not be bothered, so I downgraded!". No technical details, no logs, no what-so-ever.
Since the release, a bunch of more people complained about similar problems. Again, no one provided (or was willing to provide) information that helps to solve the problem. Nobody was even bothered to create a proper bug report in bugzilla.
My VPN connections run for more than six months with strongswan 5 and I never had any problems since then.
If someone really has interest in solving this, maybe it is time that you start the action and help the developers. This is not a project where you can tell people what they should do (for you). This is an Open Source project - so everyone is able to read the source code, check what changes have been made and to provide a fix.
-Michael