doubt regarding the metadata.brokers.list parameter in producer properties

Hi,

I am running kafka 0.8 and zoo keeper along with it. The problem i have
is with the metadata.broker.list which is present in the producer
properties. As i am using the zookeeper can i just ignore this property
and kafka will work fine?
We run kafka on the ec2 nodes, lets say we are running some 3 kafka
servers, and producers metadata.broker.list populated with the ip's of
these nodes, tomorrow if we add two more nodes for scaling up the system
we need to add those nodes to producers.
Lets say in the above scenario(my nodes ip's are non elastic), then for
some reason one of my nodes is down, and we brought up then the ip will
get changed, so the producers should be changed to have new ip? what
will happen if one after another all these servers are down and being
brought up?

Is there any way I don't give the list but kafka with the help of
zookeeper gets the list. I know kafka do not want to be dependent on
zookeeper, but what should we do in such a case.

Thanks
Arjun Narasimha Kota