Good news criveraf!
You have proven that its not a physical issue with the Almond WAN network port. The Almond WAN port and Motorola SB6141 network ports are not broken.
The WAN LED did not blink at all after hooking the cable to the modem.
This appears to be an odd auto negotiation issue relating to either the Motorola SB 6141 or the Almond.
Googling "Motorola SB 6141 Gb network auto negotiation problems" does have a few hits and its appearing more in the white SB-6141 rather than the black SB-6141.
So other folks with Motorola SB 6141 modems are having issues similiar to your issue.
BTW do you have a category 6 patch cable to use? Really though it would only help with a Gb connection (blue LED on modem)
I am not sure that it would make any different but it doesn't hurt.
Comcast said they cannot do a factory reset of my modem from their end; only a warm reset and other things. They insist everything looks fine from their end.
Yes they can.
You can too; might be easier to just do it as described above.
FYI, when I do a factory reset on the modem I don't see anything happening on the modem. Lights on the front of the modem don't change, don't turn off or flash, nothing. And the modem's admin web screen does not give any indication of a factory reset in progress once I click on the button and confirm on the popup box to proceed with the factory reset. I just trust it is doing it, but I don't even know when it's done. I just wait like 5 minutes (in some instances I have waited up to 30 mins just to be sure).
Do the re-stuff of the Motorola modem like this: (also maybe switch to Internet Explorer instead of Firefox). It will take less than five minutes. Watch the LED lights on the Motorola 6141. A reboot will always shut them off and on one at a time.
1 - Click on Reset All Defaults
2 - wait a minute or so
3 - Click on Restart Cable Modem
ALL of the LED lamps will go off and then on from the top down. Meanwhile move your cable from the Laptop to the Almond. Watch the LED on the WAN port of the Almond to see if it goes on.
You cannot break anything. I have done it a few times here. It will take a couple of minutes to do its stuff from scratch. It should connect up right away.
Did the laptop connect to the Motorola SB6141 at Gb or Mb speeds?
Another thing you can do (but its a waste of a switch) is to connect a network switch Ethernet cable to the Motorola SB 6141 and a second Ethernet cable to the Almond WAN port just to see if that works.
I am guessing that any old switch will do fine for a test.
OR
1 - Connect your laptop to the Motorola 6141 modem
2 - do the reset of the modem as described above (192.168.100.1 web pages)
3 - while resetting; move the cable from you laptop to your Almond (powered off)
4 - power on your Almond and see if the reset configuration of your Motorola SB 6141 makes the Almond LED blink (look there first).
Googling some more on the Motorola SB 6141 issues and fixes found a couple of more "fixes".
1 - Using your laptop connection tick the auto negotiation piece of the laptops network device "off" then "on". Then move the cable from the laptop to the Almond.
2 - Using your laptop connection hard set the network interface to 100Mbps full duplex and leave it that way; move the cable then to the Almond. IE: in Wintel its System / Hardware / Device Manager / network adapters / network adapter / advanced tab