hmmm. here is what I did. I copied the fstab to /home/acluser1 a user/dir that I am using to understand acl's. I then run ls -l and it shows wr-r--r-- on that file and owned by root. I run getfacl on the file and see the same permission. ok all good. I then created another user called acluser2. I then went back to the copied fstab file in the /homeacluser1 dir and ran the following command:

setfacl -m u:acluser2:rwx: /home/acluser1/fstab.
then I run both a ls -l on the file as well as a getfacl on it. strangely the permission in both show wr-wrx-r (I am showing the ls result but it was the same permission set in the getfacl result). I can see from ls -l a + at the end of the line which I assume means there is an acl on the file...but what I don't understand...why does granting total access to one user (acluser2 rwx) on this file now make the file show total access (wrx) in the group listing (the middle 3) in the ls -l command???. in the getfacl result it also shows group with rwx permission. BUT I SPECIFIED THE USER ACLUSER2 in the above command (setfacl -m u:acluser2:rwx: /home/acluser1/fstab) so why is the group now set to rwx where it was just r-- previously??? I am totally confused here

I can't really find much on the internet explaining this...help me out if you can and thank you in advance...

I repeated your experiment and noticed the same thing. However, a member of the group was not able to read the file. So the effect of the acl permissions seem valid. The ls -l listing seems invalid. The info manual states that a "+" sign is added at the end. I did see that. I can't answer about the group permissions displayed.

I used "setfacl -m g:tuser:r fstab" to give the group user read access. This worked as well. Write access was denied.