I had the same issue with pfsense to pfsense ipsec tunnels showing connected but traffic wasn't passing. My particular problem was every few hours... not every week. Nothing in the configuration on both ends helped in P1 or P2 settings. I don't have tons of traffic on these tunnels... but, i wanted them to stay established for quicker response. Don't know if it will solve your issues or not... but, my work-around was to set the P2 "automatically ping host" to an ip on the remote end... which only pings every 4 minutes (by default) and change the default to 10 seconds. Seemed to be something with the tunnels timing out and re-establishing would eventually work (re-establish) after 1-2 minutes of continuous pings from a desktop.
Solution (which i found on a separate issue on a separate post) was to change the ipsec P2 ping times from 4 minutes (240 sec) to 10 seconds to keep ipsec tunnels alive. And from what i have seen, ipsec tunnels have been stable (for a week).
** Careful with this... but, here's the steps i took.
1.) Go to Diagnostics / Edit File
2.) Click on "Browse"
3.) go to \etc directory
4.) Click on "Pfsense-rc" (in the root of etc)
5.) Add the following (you will find towards the bottom of the config file - about 1 page up):
#Start ping handler every 240 seconds
/usr/local/bin/minicron 240 $varrunpath/ping_hosts.pid /usr/local/bin/ping_hosts.sh
Change that line to:
#Start ping handler every 10 seconds
/usr/local/bin/minicron 10 $varrunpath/ping_hosts.pid /usr/local/bin/ping_hosts.sh
6.) Save config
7.) reboot
Note: if you upgrade the code, this file will most likely default back to the 240 seconds and will need to be changed again.
