More recent comments indicate that this does now work. Claudia Schmeing posted this guide to trouble-shooting in early March 2000. It may be worth checking list archives for a more recent version. Your mail has inspired me to write a little trouble shooting guide to supplement and connect the existing docs on the subject. Here's v. 1.
Comments are welcome.
First, try to find verbose text that describes how things are going wrong or creating unexpected results. And for errors that have to do with the use of a conn, you may not even have this. On some systems, the logfiles are differently named. See man ipsec.conf for details. If you have a connection established but the packets aren't doing what you think they should, play with klipsdebug.