I've resized many partitions over the years on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X -- but always using a GUI. However, the time has come where the preset partition sizes my data center placed on my server aren't the right sizes and I need to resize a production server's disks. I could fiddle with it and probably do OK, but given that it is a production server, I wanted to get some advice about the right way to do this. I do have KVM over IP access, so if it is best to take the server offline and boot off a rescue partition, I can do that.

root [/var/lib/mysql]# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       9.9G  2.1G  7.3G  23% /
tmpfs           7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1        99M   77M   18M  82% /boot
/dev/sda8       884G  463G  376G  56% /home
/dev/sda3       9.9G  8.0G  1.5G  85% /usr
/dev/sda5       9.9G  9.1G  308M  97% /var
/usr/tmpDSK     2.0G   38M  1.8G   3% /tmp

As you can see /var and /usr are quite close to being full and I've actually had to symlink some logs on /usr to directories in /home to balance things out. What I would like to do is to add 6-10 GB each to /usr and /var, presumably taking the space from /home.

As I think about how the disk is arranged, the best thought I've come up with is to reduce /home by 16 GB, say, and move /var to the spot freed up, then allocating /var's space to /usr. However, that would put /var at the far end of the disk, which seems less than idea, given that MySQL has all of its data on that partition. I'd love to take the space out of the closer end of /usr, but I assume that would take a very arduous (and perhaps risky) process of moving all of the data in /usr around. I seem to recall having such a process fail for me on a computer in the past.

The other option might be to merge / and /usr since / is underutilized, though I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

Do you have any suggestions both on the best reallocation plan and the commands to use to accomplish it?

UPDATE: I should add -- here's the partition table. There's one unused partition, which, if memory serves, was the original tmp location before I created a tmp image:

    Name        Flags      Part Type  FS Type          [Label]      Size (MB)
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                      Unusable                      1.05*
    sda1        Boot        Primary   Linux ext2                    106.96*
    sda2                    Primary   Linux ext3                    10737.42*
    sda3                    Primary   Linux ext3                    10737.42*
    sda5        NC          Logical   Linux ext3                    10738.47*
    sda6        NC          Logical   Linux swap / Solaris          2148.54*
    sda7        NC          Logical   Linux ext3                    1074.80*
    sda8        NC          Logical   Linux ext3                    964098.53*