Working on implementing Multi-WAN at our office (more about that later), in which we use a rather special routing setup, we got this error message on our IPSEC tunnels:

Quote
ipsec_setup: Starting Openswan IPsec U2.4.12/K2.6.26-2-amd64...
ipsec_setup: no default route, %defaultroute cannot cope!!!

While the reason was obvious to me (there's indeed no default route in the main routing table, this is by design), fixing the problem was not.
I tried adding options like leftnexthop=ip-address but it did not really matter; the error persisted.

After searching around Google, I came across a post with a similar error, along with an unusual solution: adding the following line solve  ...