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I wanted to create a second Aperture Vault on a hfsplus volume, but hosted on my network. I could do this using Disk Utility, but due to some complications in the way my Linux Samba server is setup I needed to create the disk images on my Linux server directly.

In this case I am creating a 160GB volume named 'APV.dmg' to match the size of the external firewire drive I use with Aperture.

The following command will create the empty disk image:

dd if=/dev/zero of=APV.dmg bs=1M count=163840

Then to format it as a hfsplus volume:

mkfs.hfsplus -v 'Aperture Vault' APV.dmg

I test copied some files over my LAN (gigE) to this volume when it was mounted on my Mac, and the speeds are equivalent to an external firewire drive. That is, they are limited by the 5400rpm 2.5" SATA drive in my laptop rather than any other component.