I recently ran into a problem wherein the content management system I use for this site (WordPress) trashed the admin password. As that meant that I couldn’t log into my own site, I was faced with a bit of a dilemma. WordPress uses MD5 Hashes to secure user passwords in the database, so editing the password in the database directly isn’t an option as the string appears to be gibberish to humans. As the admin user has unique abilities, I really need the ability to login. A bit of a quandary, yes? Yes.
Luckily someone posted a link to the MD5 hash calculator on the WordPress Support forum. This tool let me encode a new password for the admin user, which I could then insert directly into the database, over-writing the problematic password.
From my logs I could see you are linking to the md5 hash generator at bfl.rctek.com. It has been removed (as well as the entire sub-domain) and won’t be returning.
Thanks for the update Daz. For those still looking for a way to solve this problem, there are some other MD5 Hash generators available, including this one, which “performs Message Digest Algorithm (MD5), US Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA1), SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 cryptographic hash calculations.”