[strongSwan] strongswan inactive

[neil payne]

Hi,
I've been trying to set up a vpn (ike v1, site to site with PSK) for the last few weeks between two ubuntu hosts without success. I've tried the varying configuration options like using rightsubnetwithin instead of rightsubnet and testing from the firewalls using leftsourceip but nothing seems to generate interesting traffic. I have manually edited ipsec.conf and ipsec.secrets only, am I missing a fundamental step?
I'm attaching the config files (ipsec.secrets contents appended to the end of ipsec.conf for convenience of attaching only 2 files here instead of 4), I don't see any traffic from the left firewall hitting the right firewall. 
The only peculiarity may be that the left firewall is within an Amazon cloud but I'm lead to believe this should not stop the ipsec tunnel from building - please help if you can?
Regards,
Neil.