The SRC alignment step of initial alignment has been failing for the last 8 days and a for more days before that. The SR2 alignment step will run, then an operator will move SRM to increase ASC-AS_A peaks and make the AS air camera spot better. Even though these have all looked good recently, it hasn't been enough to get the trigger thresholds for SRCL high enough for it to lock. Operators have been skipping this step without problems, so alignment must be at least passable.

If this sounds familiar, it's because we have brought these thresholds up and down in the past (alog70013 has a good summary). I think the alignment of the entire IFO is changing so that we can't the SRCL input high enough depending on the alignment. Rather than us changing these thresholds every few months we could have some code lower the trigger thresholds if other conditions look good (ASC-AS_A for example). I'll try this out tomorrow to see if this will lock with our current alignment but also avoid the situation we had before this where we would get false locks and wildly swing the SRM.