A discussion and possible solution to puzzle 1 is now available at Iron Scripter Prequel Puzzle 1 - A solution
Remember this isn't presented as a definitive solution. It's my view of the solution. Please also note that the faction specific parts are indicative and not prescriptive - they are my view of how the different factions would approach solving the puzzle.
Note that there’s no Test-Connection in Powershell Core.
The Unannoying Faction would also comment out making $ComputerName mandatory, to make it easy to query the local computer.
or put in localhost as default entry 🙂
localhost didn’t work for me. Only $null.
That may be because WinRM is not set up on your local machine to allow remote access. You can confirm this by trying:
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_ComputerSystem -ComputerName localhost
one thing i thought was interesting was the computer serial duplication (thought that was an error 🙂 ), so another thought was to connect to the win32_bios class and use that serial number. thanks for the solution example, i was struggling with what the code from the different factions might look like. Mind is a bit of a mixture.
I thought the same thing, so I also queried the win32_bios class. I then wanted to try out a much slower solution, so I did Get-ComputerInfo since it contains the computer’s name, model, and serial number. This would have peeved the Flawless faction since I noticed that the call for the BIOS Serial Number has a typo (BIOSSeralNumber). Quite interesting.