Question re inserting hashed strings (I think)

I'm running Oracle 9.2.0.8.0 (vendor restriction) Enterprise Edition on RHEL4 all 64-bit. I have created a process which allows me to automate a refresh of our developer sandboxes from the production database using RMAN but there is one last piece I am stuck on. The application itself has a table which is used for authentication and it contains a password field and I believe the password is hashed by the application -

SQL> desc tenants

 Name                                      Null?    Type
 ----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------
 ID                                        NOT NULL NUMBER(11)
 ACCT_NO                                            NUMBER(11)
 ABBR                                               VARCHAR2(4)
 DESCR                                              VARCHAR2(50)
 USERNAME                                           VARCHAR2(15)
 PASSWORD                                           VARCHAR2(15)
 URL                                                VARCHAR2(100)
 TIMESTAMP                                          DATE

I can select * from tenants and see the following -

SQL> select * from tenants;

        ID ACCT_NO ABBR DESCR

---------- ---------- ---- --------------------------------------------------
USERNAME        PASSWORD

       261          0 T1   T1
axispkg         some-weird-string

27-APR-1999 Now in the developers sandboxes I want to update the password field in this table with a development password. I can do this through the application but in order to fully automate the process I want to do it using SQLPLUS so I try something like this -

SQL> update axis.tenants set password = 'some-weird-string'; SQL> commit;

The update is accepted but it is apparently not the correct string as users are unable to connect and I must then go in through the application and update the password. I don't know how the application hashes the password.

Can I do this and if so how, what am I missing? I realize this may not be good practice but if someone can point me in the right direction, or tell me I can't do it, I would appreciate it.

Thanks.

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l