I'd like to propose including the fix for GEODE-6959 in 1.10.0. Spring Boot users are very likely to hit this NPE during forceDisconnect.
If a custom log4j2.xml is used without specifying the Geode AlertAppender, GMSMembershipManager may throw a NullPointerException when invoking AlertAppender.getInstance().stopSession() during a forceDisconnect. This change prevents the NullPointerException allowing forceDisconnect to finish. Tests are included with this fix. PR: https://github.com/apache/geode/pull/3899 GEODE-6959: NPE if AlertAppender is not defined Thanks, Kirk and Mark
