I am trying to do a bare metal install of kubernetes without using kubeadm because I want to use the dashboard/ui with user provisioning and kubeadm doesn't allow user provisioning so dashboard is not accessible outside local host.
I have successfully installed and have a master and a node running but I am unable to deploy dashboard because it require rbac/cluster role binding and that seems to have been implemented in 1.6.1 while the repository seems to only install 1.5.2.
Any suggestion for either deploying dashboard with 1.5.2 or how to get higher version without kubeadm.
repo used: https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/kubernetes-el7-x86_64/
So, I'm unclear why you are not seeing anything above 1.5.2, because the primary.xml from that yum repo contains kubelet-1.10.0-0.x86_64.rpm and its kubectl-1.10.0-0 friend
You should definitely not stay on, or worse provision, such an ancient version.
As for non-kubeadm mechanisms, there are probably a lot of them, but you may have great success with kubespray, which not only is a modern, supported, provisioning platform that comes with RBAC and the dashboard automagically configured, they test on both CentOS and RHEL. I like that one specifically because at high enough levels of verbosity, ansible will show you exactly what it is doing, which is overwhelmingly helpful in debugging things if when something goes awry.