lies, lies, damn lies. you've never witnessed faster googling than when a system is down. googling is usually much faster than trying to recall the proper switches for all utilities. I find Google to be far better sometimes than even man pages. I've only been a sysadmin for 5 or so years so maybe my views will change

To me, it seems the questions were pretty basic and geared towards judging if someone has had experience actually administering linux servers. How many people (who actually competently deal with linux servers) need to use google to know what the output of top is? or how to kill a process? If you don't already know what MTU is about, how would you even consider an incorrect MTU as being an issue when you're debugging an issue in production?

Likewise, I wouldn't hire a Senior Javascript developer who can't describe in her own words what a closure is and what it's useful for, or talk about execution context (what 'this' refers to) and how to control that. You just can't have seriously written any javascript and not have encountered those things enough that they've been burned into your mind (though maybe an intern or a Junior developer that'd be okay)

When investigating issues, knowledge like that is always going to solve it 10x faster then it would be if you didn't know it by heart.

Unless it's the network that's down. Or is that the job of a network admin?

it's probably true that sysadmins with tons of experience can do everything by heart ... but that is a separate issue of whether someone can be functional and operational and still have to check google once in a while.