After a restart, the "Distributed search > Search peer > status" is down and I have to reenter the authentication to reestablish the connection between the search head and the search peer.
Does it happen with all restarts or happens to all search heads? Did you deploy something to your search heads to cause restart? How are you deploying/creating your distsearch.conf?
Happens with all restarts with either the search head or search peer. We perform weekly restarts for maintenance purposes. I've created the distsearch.conf using both the splunk web and editing the distsearch.conf manually and everything is fine until we do a restart of splunk. For some reason it is not reestablishing that connection. This began when we upgraded the search peer (indexer) to 7.0. The search head is currently at 6.3.