I just used brute force to get the results I wanted. You're not missing anything :)

I thought, after posting, about messing around with the eval, but someone had something better for me to do :)

Here's the brute force hack, and I do mean hack, I used to get the right data to make it work. I'm sure there are much quicker ways of doing this, but I had CPU cycles and time to kill. It took less than 24 hours on my puny box. Further chaos could be created by pushing for more "random" strings, but that just seemed like it would try my patience too much. I didn't bother cleaning it up much, but here it is FWIW.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @foo;
my $salt    = 'ja';
my $match   = 'ph';

for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
 $foo[0] = $_;
 for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
  $foo[1] = $_;
  for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
   $foo[2] = $_;
   for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
    $foo[3] = $_;
    for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
     $foo[4] = $_;
     for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
      $foo[5] = $_;
      for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
       $foo[6] = $_;
       for ('A'..'Z','a'..'z') {
        $foo[7] = $_;
        if ( crypt(join('', @foo), $salt) =~ /$match/) {
         print "Result: ", join('', @foo, "\n");
         exit;
        }
       }
      }
     }
    }
   }
  }
 } 
}
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