The roadwarrior dave tries to set up a connection to roadwarrior carol but because carol has set the strongswan.conf option initiator_only = yes she ignores the repeated IKE requests sent by dave.
After the failed connection attempt by dave, roadwarrior carol sets up a connection to gateway moon. The authentication is based on X.509 certificates. Upon the successful establishment of the IPsec tunnels, leftfirewall=yes automatically inserts iptables-based firewall rules that let pass the tunneled traffic. In order to test both tunnel and firewall, carol pings the client alice behind the gateway moon.