This object is explicitly marked obsolete in its own description, having originally offered only a single selectable value (EAP-MD5) for the supplicant's authentication method before being superseded by the more flexible bitmask object cienaCes8021xSuppEAPAllowedMethods, which can represent multiple simultaneously allowed methods. An admin configuring a device today should ignore this object entirely and set cienaCes8021xSuppEAPAllowedMethods instead, since this legacy field can't represent anything beyond the single EAP-MD5 option it was built around, such as the newer EAP-TLS support the rest of this MIB clearly supports. For example, a script that still tries to configure supplicant authentication method by writing to this obsolete object instead of the allowed-methods bitmask would silently fail to enable EAP-TLS even if that's what the admin actually intended.