Running parted *remotely*

[Philip Mak]

I have a dedicated server located in an ISP's data center. It has a
partition / (6 GB) and /usr (13 GB). I would like to repartition it.

The standard procedure would be run parted on a boot disk and easily
repartition everything while the hard drive is unmounted I suppose, but
seeing as I only have telnet/ssh access to the server, I can't do that.
Furthermore, none of the technicians at the ISP support parted.

Does anyone have suggestions for how I might accomplish this? My thoughts
are to do something like this:

- build a statically linked telnetd that doesn't need /etc/*, run it on
  /usr
- copy /bin/* and /sbin/* into /usr
- using "fuser", find and kill all processes that are using the /
  partition
- unmount the / partition
- repartition it to a smaller size that I want
- mount the / partition
- run statically linked telnetd on /
- stop processes using /usr and unmount /usr
- repartition the space being taken by /usr

Am I on the right track? Am I thinking of doing something really stupid
and should stop before I trash my server? Where can I find a statically
linked telnetd, and do I need anything other than /bin/* and /sbin/* in
order for the system to be minimally functional?